


Teeth

by chxrlut



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Art, Broken Love, Eating Disorders, Emotional, Gay, Gay Love, Language, M/M, Mental Illness, Nihilistic Mess, Phan Angst, Phan Fluff, Psychology, Sadness, Self-Harm, Words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-10-07 23:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 141,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10371993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chxrlut/pseuds/chxrlut
Summary: PART ONE“I am hoping to make a discovery here, to express the feelings of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their minglings and their oppositions, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.” — Vincent Van Gogh.The story of a broken marriage between a retired writer and his manic husband, and their twisted capabilities to make language bleed.





	1. Milk

**Author's Note:**

> This story is currently an experiment, a way to release the fucking shit I have in my head and also to gain some sort-of confidence boost. I usually leave an introduction of sorts here where I give a little insight into the process behind making the fic and also what to expect, but right now I’m so sad and so tired that all I have to say is I don’t know if this will make any sense to you.
> 
> It’s weird and messy but I really just hope you find something in the words. I was gonna wait a while to post, but I’m honestly in need of some positivity/general feedback. It’d be great because it would allow me to determine whether or not to continue.
> 
> But, anyway, I’m sorry for the sadness. I’m sorry for the anger and I’m sorry for the confusion. Writing this is saving a lot of me and I think that reflects in the words.
> 
> I hope you feel something.

**number one: milk**

_They_ say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. And they say Dan Howell eats nothing because it does the same, say his insides are coated instead with the black ink passed on from the moments his tongue has touched the end of his pen. Coated with red from the moments his heart has bled like its been slashed right down the middle with a steak knife under a shaking hand. And it makes a sort-of black-red, a sort-of pseudo blood. All over his lungs and his stomach and his gut. Scattered around, pushed right in where they fit.

Dan Howell has the numbers zero and nine tattooed to the inside of his ring finger. And there’s a ring, golden with originality, concealing it. It always feels like its tightening around his skin and if he were to find a way to reach down his throat and pull his heart right out, there’d be _take the bloody thing off_ written right across the organ in the black ink from his tongue. Smudged with the red.

But he’s too busy wondering if Van Gogh ever got to see his heart coloured in yellow to actually take it off. If he ever used his paintbrush to pluck apart his ribs like bristles, all careful fingers and yellow tips and _I just want to be fucking happy_ over the back of a starry night canvas.

Dan hasn’t seen his zero and his nine for a while. There used to be a tally for the months but now there’s one for the years, and the metaphor moulded by complex fingers is found somewhere in the silence of late Tuesday evenings when a man wearing the same ring isn’t there to mumble _you’re going to be okay_. Like being okay is defined by still being married.

They’re still fucking married.

They’re still fucking married.

“We’re still fucking married.”

Dan doesn’t recall the number of times he’s said it because there isn’t a tally for that. It doesn’t matter enough. It doesn’t matter that there’s a little zero and a little nine and a little band of gold and it all just feels like Vincent Van Gogh tasting the ends of his paintbrush. Having something and trying to make it better. Stupid fucking feelings and stupid fucking colours, a café terrace at night and a yellow house.

Dan Howell’s band of gold does not represent fuck all of what the poets say it does. And his zero and his nine represent only the fact that he thought he was a poet when he decided to get the year he met his lover inked to him. It’s a gift from the same man, his band of gold, who blessed him with marriage and sweet kisses and _I can’t even fucking look at you_. And _hey, Dan, let’s see who can last the longest in our silent apartment without dropping their bag of marbles and losing a couple under the sofa_ —

And _hey, Dan, you’re a real fucking mess but I can’t remember how to kiss away your tears. I can’t remember how to find my way to the bedroom we’re supposed to share because I’ve always got my hands around a bottle of vodka but it’s okay because so have you and_ —

Fuck that, Dan thinks. Fuck that and fuck him.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. And sometimes people do weird shit to make them happy, like cracking bottles just to line their pieces so they can try and compare shards of glass to a relationship that made them ink numbers on their skin just to cover them with a golden ring. Like tasting the ends of black pens to write a quatrain about four minutes in the middle of Manchester station, four eyeballs and four fingers and four _I love you_ ’s, _just so you don’t forget._

People do weird shit to make them happy.

Dan Howell eats nothing but black ink and Dan Howell smashes bottles and orders their pieces into lines and Dan Howell hasn’t looked at the black numbers on his finger because he can’t decide if they’re worse than Phil Lester’s ring. If the year they met is worse than the year they married, if existing alongside a memory and a mess is worse than packing your shit and moving back home to your mother’s best attempt at ignorance and your father’s best attempt at sticking around.

People do weird shit to make them happy.

Dan’s psychiatrist tells him his parents’ mistakes have grown fingers and they’re tampering with his brain, pushing their knuckles into his frontal lobe and draining him of serotonin. His mother’s screaming, his father’s screaming, his brother’s crying and the inside of his closet. It’s a muddle of memories imitating organs, scattered around and pushed right in where they fit.

Dan’s psychiatrist tells him his heart wants to let go of what used to be and Dan tells him the worst thing about the word _divorced_ is that you can make it rhyme with _before_ and it hurts like the sound of grinding teeth between “I want you” and “I need you” and—

“I’ve never been in love.”

They haven’t spoken for eight months. Two hundred and forty three days, on average. And Dan doesn’t even care because he’s too busy thinking about Van Gogh and yellow paint and empty stomachs and hiding from his parents’ screaming to think about the fact that he’s divorced without being divorced. That he should just taking his fucking ring off. That Phil probably has. That sometimes things aren’t alright and sometimes we cannot change the course of existence, regardless of whether or not our hands smash against fate in fists so tight they splatter the letters of _protest_ out like seven bloody gashes. That he doesn’t believe in God a whole lot lately and the world spins the right way, maybe, but it spins too fast. Or too slow.

That he’s no little or no more than a quatrain about four minutes in Manchester station and a zero and a nine and a smear of yellow paint and a serotonin deficiency. He’s no little or no more than the one Phil Lester married and the one Phil Lester divorced without divorcing. No little or no more than fifteen minutes past three on a grey morning, when the sky is milk and the air tastes like the affair Phil never mentioned because it’s not really an affair.

But they’re still fucking married.

They’re still fucking married when Dan tells him, “I can smell her on your breath.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you. What’s done is done. Don’t cry over spilt milk,” Phil says. And it’s been hours and it’s been days and it’s been weeks but he’s standing there against the doorframe and Dan can feel the perfume on his shirt. He can see the girl under his skin.

He slept with a woman a number of weeks ago and she’s got a little bump in her stomach, a little place where it rounds off to remind her she’s carrying the weight of a man’s child just slipped in somewhere in the filing cabinet at the front of her mind. Because he’s no little or no more than a one-night stand, a string of words with no beginning and a quick fix before sunrise.

“We’re still fucking married.”

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Phil retaliates. “I wouldn’t have done it in the first place if it did.”

Dan’s sitting on the cold kitchen floor and he’s got a voice from hell when he spits, “Fuck yourself. You can’t blame me for this. You slept with somebody else and she’s fucking pregnant. She’s _pregnant_ , Phil.”

“Why the hell does it matter that I slept with her anymore? This isn’t a marriage,” Phil seethes. “This isn’t even a _relationship_.”

The truth comes to nestle in Dan’s frightened ears. He always was a skittish boy. Terrified of everything, his mother used to say. Terrified of the day and the night and the kids at school and on the bus. Terrified of being alone and terrified of being the opposite.

“Get off the floor,” Phil says to his silence. Dan takes the words like they’re shards of broken glass and he lines them up and orders them so all the letters are jumbled and it’s something like _floor_ and _get off_. And he thinks about the time he was eighteen and drunk and they had sex on the same tiles and—

“Get off the fucking _floor_.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Dan’s fingers come around his ears and he brings his knees to his chest, face to his knees. His heart is aching and he wants to go home. Phil kissed his open mouth right where he’s sitting and he can’t fucking remember what he tasted like. He can’t fucking remember how to spell _therapy_ or _eating disorders_ or _you’re the reason he doesn’t want to touch you anymore_. He can’t fucking remember anything at fifteen minutes past three on that grey morning, when the sky is milk and the air tastes like holding somebody else. Like little bumps and tiny fingers. He can’t even remember if he washed his mug of hot chocolate up from earlier, or if it’s still sitting in the centre of the sink. Dark blemishes in the bottom, smeared over the cream. 

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

Yellow and stomach and _Phil, Phil, Phil_. Arms and noses and _please, just be the boy I fell in love with._

He’s pathetic, he knows it. It doesn’t matter that he does and it doesn’t matter that he is. It matters only that he’s still got his ring over his zero and his nine under the milky sky at three fifteen and they are still fucking married, even though one of them is having a child with a stranger and the other is just as much a stranger and—

It’s all a mess of words and colours, Dan thinks, sad things inked down onto a page to build the structure of a sad story. And he’s sitting on a cold floor at three fifteen—three _sixteen_ or maybe even _seventeen_ —and he’s got a pyjama shirt patterned with little galaxies hanging from his frame. He wants to ask Phil Lester if he sees aliens in the cosmos over his chest, and if his aliens are green with little antennas like TV sets. Or if his aliens are yellow like Vincent Van Gogh’s, or red and black like his. Even though he’d much rather prefer yellow, too.

Delicate yellow.

“Just get off the goddamn floor and sort yourself out,” Phil’s words are controlled with a coolness developed once over months but now over years and Dan’s terrified of it. “I can’t fucking deal with this right now.”

“You never could,” Dan says. It doesn’t mean anything. His heart’s bleeding like its been slashed right down the middle with a steak knife under a shaking hand and he kicks his feet out, reaches up to grip the counter with his scarred knuckles and stands up.

“Where are you going?” Phil asks him. Mouths and stomachs and a woman with her hands on a married man.

Dan’s stride is measured with slight stumbles as he forces himself past his husband and right down their hallway. It’s lit dimly, and he’s terrified of the dark. A thirty something man in space pyjamas with a wandering heart exhausting blood over itself is terrified of the dark. His gut is twisting and his lungs are compressing. He’s terrified of dying.

Phil doesn’t follow him, and Dan doesn’t expect him to. It’s a sequence, of sorts. All very predictable and all very tedious; answers to the next, unasked questions are already strung up over the walls. And the monotony breaths through the disarray of memories like it’s okay to exist in a situation where you can envision a spouse’s affair because your words and scarred knuckles drove him away, right down a little country lane winding from the city. Winding from you, sitting there in a London apartment with a bottle of vodka for an empty stomach and a zero for a nine. In space pyjamas impelling space between you. In space pyjamas because aliens are not fucking green, they’re red and they’re black and they’re yellow.

But they could be green, Dan supposes. They could be green all they like.

It doesn’t matter a whole fucking lot when he’s walking down the hallway because there are shadows behind eyes— _irises, irises, irises_ —and everything is black, but he wants purple. He wants yellow and red and—Hell, he wants a fucking rainbow. But he gets these silhouettes instead, drawn with half-sewn gazes that terrify the vulnerability in his cornea. He sees flashes of colour and his heart’s leaping like it’s tied to one of those green machines in those white hospitals with a piece of string.

He wants to scream and he wants to cry and he know his psychiatrist tells him all these things about his fears and all these things about his problems, but he’s never fucking listened and he couldn’t lay it out in front of himself if he needed to. Because he’s no little or no more than an _I should have_ and an _I could have_. And all the syllables of opportunity that come between the two of them.

He finds hell in the darkness and he can’t even report if it’s pretty or not because he can’t _see_. And he can’t conjure a murmur for help because the shadows have their hands over his mouth and then around his neck and he’d consider the possibility that they’re trying to kill him before—

Before he’s shutting himself off in his bedroom and the air’s clotting back into his lungs. There’s a thud against the closed door—he hears it, he swears he fucking does—and his chest’s struggling with its lack of coordination along the tightrope of delusion and reality.

People do weird shit to make them happy.

Phil Lester sleeps with women because maybe he just likes arcs in stomachs and Dan Howell doesn’t eat anything because maybe he just doesn’t want to be what Phil Lester likes anymore. He whispers poems of “acute mania with generalised delirium” and eating disorders through the silence of three eighteen and strings paintings to his walls because they and he are simultaneously nothing without them.

They say Dan Howell’s room is plastered with yellow, with Van Gogh’s unsteady hand and agitated textures. They say it’s no little or no more than a place to call home. And he’s just a too-thin man in a space-printed pyjama shirt slumped against his door with his hands over his ears and no fucking arc in his stomach, but a slashed heart.

His English teacher used to tell him he used connectives too much in his descriptive writing pieces. Told him his sentences were too long. And he told him his _thoughts_ were too long, so why the fuck couldn’t his sentences be? He told him full stops were overrated and that sometimes an ‘and’ does much nicer because then you’re running out of breath as your eyes flutter back and forth and it’s a little bit like sailing to the end of the world. It’s always better to fight for it than to not have to fight at all.

But they say people rarely give a shit about Dan Howell and his desperate, stylistic conventions. And they say he’s no little or no more than a friend of failure and the yellow paintings over nothing are just nothing within themselves and the shadows are always trying to tear them down, like they’re always trying to pull his ribs apart (bristles coated in yellow) when he wakes with one on his chest.

Dan gets up from the floor and moves across his carpet to the notebook open on his desk. There’s a black pen balanced over the messy handwriting, like it’s a boat and the words beneath it are the fucking ocean. He’s shaking when he sits down and the gold on his finger is highlighted by his desk-lamp when he starts writing about shadows. Shadows dancing under monochrome filters. Dan thinks he hears the door open and he knows his psychiatrist told him to just fucking ignore what he can, but he turns just in case it’s Phil and—

It isn’t.

It isn’t anything.

_This isn’t a marriage. This isn’t even a relationship._

Dan returns to writing. Writing beside a painting he’s studied for too many hours with droopy eyes. And then he puts down his pen and rests his elbows on his knees, pushes his face into his hands and tries to breathe through delusion. Through loneliness at eternity’s gate.

He doesn’t believe in God a whole lot lately.

But he spends his night there anyway. At eternity’s gate. His hand scribbles across the page and the spasms spurting from his elbow speak of his tire but he can’t remember what Phil’s arms feel like anymore and he can’t remember how to be anything but something people fall in love with just to fall right back out of. He can’t remember what his zero and his nine look like. And he’s got to fucking get it out, he’s got to fucking keep going because if he stops then the shadows down the hall will shatter the simplicity to remind him his husband slept with a woman no little or no more than the mother of his child.

So full fucking stops are just full fucking irrelevant and his dumb fucking English teacher can try all he likes to explain the dumb fucking laws of language, but Dan is damned if he doesn’t manipulate adjectives and fire them back like bullets of _you cannot tell me what to make of what I feel_. He’s damned if he doesn’t construct syllables to eloquently articulate the feeling of a contortionist using a steak knife on his soul.

It took Phil Lester sleeping with somebody else to devastate eight months of predicted death—of non-relationships and non-marriages and scattered pieces of vodka bottles—and if all it takes is an ugly fucking sentence to get Dan Howell through it, then his dumb fucking English teacher can grade him a failure all he pleases.

Because people do weird shit to make them happy. Write, paint, fuck, scream, ink numbers just to cover them with gold. Smash bottles just to line their pieces and build cars of broken verbs to send your lover winding down a country lane, right into the arms of another. Dan’s pain contrives illness and his illness contrives pain and it’s just so fucking repetitive. A sequence, of sorts.

Some time past three on a grey morning.

The sky is milk and Dan is terrified of everything and aliens are just green TV sets. Words are just divided immediate pauses made to interpret and communicate his loneliness.

He’s losing his fucking mind.

Goddamn, he’s losing his fucking mind.

But he’s no little or no more.

: :

It’s some time past six when he hears voices he can familiarise with. Those of humans who respire and don’t require a fucked head and a missed pill to exist. Don’t have side effects and little static voices and attenuated fingers. Don’t reach for him when he slows his hand over his page because it’s cramping up.

He can’t identify the voices for they’re just murmurs, muffled by walls and distance and the buzzing of insanity. He figures it’s Phil though, figures he’s not at the centrepiece of another delusion. So he leaves his room of yellow walls (depicted by a collage of his favourite paintings) and manages to wander down the hallway without encountering a demon of the night. The softness of sunrise is filtering in through the open doors and the flawed blinds and it’s orange and it’s colour. It’s nice to feel on his skin and he stalls there for a moment, all space pyjamas and smudged-purple irises and exhaustion in its finest state.

His stomach’s aching for something, but Dan’s just throwing verbs at the problem and eating their ad- instead of facing his own.

He pushes a hand under his shirt to soothe the faint whines and takes himself down to the living-room. The door’s held back a small stretch from the wall and the city waking in the distance is the scene’s most alluring element. On the couch, Phil’s in the same clothes as three hours ago and Dan’s mind has been so viciously dissected, halved between what he wants and what he doesn’t that he doesn’t even notice the miserable woman at his husband’s side.

“Dan,” Phil says his name, and Dan’s heart quivers with the single syllable. The pain of mental exertion is slaughtering his cognition, but his fingers dig into his palms with the yearn to run and write down how his name in his husband’s voice makes him feel. “What are you doing out of your room?”

Dan feels amusement slither across his skin at the question. Like he’s a fucking eight-year-old kid again and his mother doesn’t want him to see the man she’s drawing blueprints to demolish their home with.

“Who’s this?” The woman’s suddenly got her hand on Phil’s knee, fingers dipping down the inside of his leg.

He hasn’t told her, Dan thinks.

People do weird shit to make them happy.

“This is Dan,” Phil admits. He looks like he’s taken Dan’s fucking pen and written _please don’t tell her we’re married_ all over the side of his face so it’s disjoined and only Dan can see. 

And Dan imagines a steak knife under a shaking hand, bisecting the totality of his face so one half is his plea for silence and the other is his nonchalance directed at the pregnant woman.

Pregnant fucking woman.

Pregnant. Two syllables, eight—

—months without your name in your lover’s voice.

“I’m Dan,” Dan says. “Live here. Loved here. I’m your one-night stand’s husband.”

“No, he’s—”

“You’re _married_?” The woman’s touch is immediate and rough as she reaches for Phil’s left hand, and he yanks it away. There’s no golden band, Dan realises. And what a motherfucker it is to be right about the things you don’t want to be right about.

“It’s complicated,” Phil rushes. “We’re not really married anymore—I mean, we are _legally_ but we don’t touch or communicate or—Dan isn’t stable and—”

“This is his way of making himself feel better about fucking somebody else,” Dan’s voice drones empty through the excuse. “He really is quite good at it, don’t you think?”

“You don’t wear a ring?” The woman asks Phil with hard eyes, all troubled and messy and Dan doesn’t feel fucking anything for her but she’s carrying his husband’s child.

“No, I—It’s complicated, I told you. We’re working through shit and this doesn’t have to change anything, it doesn’t have to change how I’m going to accept responsibility and—”

“I think I should go,” The woman stands to her feet with urgency. There’s a mirror in the corner of the room and Dan stares at it as it reflects an image of a man that looks like a capital city in the middle of World War One, with all his inhabitants evacuated and marks over the structure where explosions have detonated.

“No, please, Ella,” Phil follows after her, grip hooking around her wrists. She forces him off and Dan’s too tired to explain the situation. They look like a couple of star-crossed lovers, anyway. One carrying the other’s child, the other married but devastatingly out of love. A tragedy of the blandest sorts.

“I’ll call you or—I’ll contact you in some way. I won’t disappear with your child, if that’s what you’re worried about,” This Ella is saying. “But I need to think about this, Phil. It changes everything.”

“No, of course. Okay,” Phil exhales. “I’ll show you out.”

Dan stands there with dawdling arms until he returns. And, when he does, he’s got his back to the rising city and a clenched jaw around, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you tell her?”

“Why did you bring her to our home if you didn’t want her to find out?”

“Our _home_?” Phil’s laugh peaks over the word. “Fuck you, this isn’t a home. Do you like ruining shit for me?”

“You _slept_ with her,” Dan doesn’t want to show this stranger he fucking cares, but he’d drop dead at his feet if it came to it and he’s years past hiding that. “How is that my fault?”

“The end of this goddamn marriage will be your fault.”

“Why? Because you can’t handle me? Because you—”

“Because you’re out of your fucking _mind_ , that’s why,” Phil lifts his hands and pulls at the ends of his hair. His eyes are oceans and his skin is milk and he reaches forward to pull at the pyjama-fabric over Dan’s shoulder. “Look at you. What the hell is—I can’t deal with this shit, Dan. I can’t deal with it and I can’t deal with you. I turned my back on you for one second and now it’s coming back to bite me in the ass, how is that fucking fair?”

“You turned your back on me years ago,” Dan thinks about his zero and his nine and how he’s no little or no more than something people fall in love with just to fall right back out of. “You’ve probably slept with a dozen other girls, but now you’ve fucked up and you don’t like it.”

“I’m just trying to accept responsibility for my child, I don’t need you coming in with your stupid fucking drama and self-pity and ruining that—”

And Dan doesn’t even _care_ enough to stick around and hear Phil Lester’s selfish antics about how he never could juggle a writing career and a deranged husband because he isn’t a fucking acrobat. He can’t walk across the tightropes of publishing and business with a sad man balanced on his shoulders but Dan never asked him for a ticket to the circus. Dan never asked to be a dictionary of psychotic behaviour, a suburb of affixes bordering his husband’s city of prefixes. He never asked to be something people don’t understand but sometimes he does weird shit to make him happy and sometimes that’s got to be okay.

So he starts walking back down the hallway and he doesn’t even _care_ enough to turn when he hears Phil following him. He doesn’t want to fight. He doesn’t want to fight.

He tells himself he’s going to pack his fucking bags and Phil says, “No, you’re not. What the hell? Come back here.”

Dan stumbles on the journey to his bedroom and the road is built of idioms, the morning already a cow of a day and he doesn’t even _care_ that he’s just fucking milking it.

Because he’s no little or no more than psychotic.

No little or no more than a catastrophe.

No little or no more than leaving.


	2. Acrylic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **There is possible triggering content ahead. This story is just a sad mess so I probably won’t bother putting warnings from now on. Also, there’s an excessive use of the word ‘fuck’ but I will continue to not fucking care about that.**

**number two: acrylic**

_Phil_ hasn’t been in Dan’s bedroom for more than eight months. More than one year, more than two. The last time marked the beginning of the word _permission_ because Dan couldn’t move fast enough to stop him tearing the pages out of his notebook, stop him tearing the words out of his soul. Phil was angry because Dan had been writing about him. Phil was angry because Dan didn’t have the right to anymore. Phil was angry because he didn’t know what to do and Dan was angry for that reason, too.

But now it’s different, maybe, and Dan just wants to leave and Phil just wants to—

“Dan, stop, you’re not packing your bags—Where the hell are you going to go?”

“Mom’s,” Dan chokes and brings his foot to the bottom of the door to kick at it, cracking it open.

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous, you know you’d never go back to . . . ” Phil’s voice dwindles away like a dying sunflower, painted all yellow and fading as he follows Dan into his bedroom. It’s some time past six when he looks down at his feet over his husband’s carpet, and the world comes to slow around the shift in atmosphere.

It’s been more than eight months. More than one year, more than two. And his eyes are oceans that rush to bask in the splatters of yellow all over the walls, the changes and the similarities and the things that mark what he’s lost, what he wasn’t there to see disappear. Dan doesn’t give a fuck what Phil thinks about the paintings on the nothingness or the pages over the floor or the desperate attempts at meaning. Because they’re all fragments of shit that has saved his life when Phil wasn’t there and maybe Phil knows it, so he doesn’t give them a comment as Dan reaches up to drag a bag from his closet.

It doesn’t even matter what he yanks from the coat-hangers, what clothes he stuffs inside. He proceeds to begin gathering the shit off his desk—his notebook and a couple prints of sunflowers and a glass with roses—because it’s the shit he could never go long without.

“Dan, can you just stop for a _second_?” Phil’s trying to grab his arms and they haven’t touched for more eight months, for more than one year and more than two and Dan doesn’t mean to clench his fingers over Phil’s shirt when he pushes him away but he’s so fucking glad he does. He bunches up the fabric and it’s like that time he was eighteen and drunk and they had sex on the kitchen tiles and everything was so beautiful and—

“I want to go,” Dan cries, yanking the zipper on his bag. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “Don’t stop me, you can’t stop me.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, it doesn’t fucking go in—You do what the fuck you want and nobody can change it and—” Phil’s speaking like he’s running his hands down a piece of rope. “My God, this is a step too far, Dan. You can’t just leave, you’re gonna be out on the streets—”

“I’m going to my _mom’s_ —” Dan spits out the final word like it’s something to be emphasised, like the woman’s presence in his life during the dark and the very dark is just that of a coincidence.

“No, you’re not. You can’t even drive anymore in your state,” Phil’s eyes are hard. The tide is in. “You’re a fucking psychopath, take your bag off.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Dan reaches into yesterday and the words lurch right back at Phil. “I’m going, I’m leaving, I’m not staying—”

Dan’s psychiatrist tells him insanity is repetition when the point’s already been made. But Dan’s psychiatrist doesn’t know the art of fucking words and he doesn’t know that sometimes insanity is just trying to tell your husband you’re not coming home, just trying to tell your lover you’re not loving anymore. Sometimes insanity is manipulating a language to build castles of dramatic words so you can find your voice within the stonework and use it to form the word _hurting_. Like writing is no little or no more than a box of antiseptics to clean your ugly wounds, steak knives and pregnant women and sex at midnight with vodka on the titles.

“You’re gonna end up dead, you’re not even safe in this house. You’re your own worst enemy, Dan,” Phil’s saying. He’s touching him again, trying to tear the bag from his shoulder with violent movements.

He isn’t wearing his ring.

He isn’t wearing his ring.

They’re still fucking married.

“You’re not allowed to control me anymore,” Dan whimpers and staggers out into the hallway of shadows and silhouettes, of men with disgusting slashes and burns that lunge at him with razors for fingers.

“You know, what?” Phil’s still following him. All the way up to the front door, all the way across no man’s land that’s littered with deformed puppets and scary monsters. “You fucking go. You go, Dan. You go and you ruin a little more of yourself so you’ve got nothing left to cling to when you hit the rock bottom of your delirium.”

“And you just leave me to,” Dan yanks on the door’s handle. He’s sobbing and shivering and there’s a man with an unhinged jaw, eyes black and smile black and all so empty of colour standing behind Phil. But Dan’s got sunflowers in his bag and Vincent Van Gogh painted them his own delicate yellow because people do weird shit to make them happy. “You just leave me, like you always do.”

And he isn’t even scared that the men will hurt Phil because he hopes they fucking do. He hopes they come with their razor-fingers and hack at his chest until they can play his arteries like puppet strings and leave his heart out to bleed dry on a washing line in the middle of summer. Until he knows what it feels like not to stumble off the tightrope, but to have it chained around his windpipe. Again and again and insanity is repetition when the point’s already been made.

Dan’s outside before the car. He doesn’t know how he fucking got there and he doesn’t know why he’s still crying, why the sirens in the distance are so much louder than the breeze in his ears. Their apartment block has a little parking-lot and there’s a wind-beaten tree somewhere close, under a yellow sky. His fingers are suddenly digging through his bag, shifting through the clothes and prints and he’s still got the cosmos over his chest. He finds the keys and unlocks the car and sits inside. And the only difference between the driver and the passenger is that one lacks a steering wheel and Dan realises so when he reaches forward for it, but it’s not there. It’s at his side.

Eighteen eighty three. Van Gogh created an oil painting in eighteen eighty three and he layered it thick with yellow, inked down happiness all over the sky without even drawing the sun. Because the sun is overrated and Dan cares only for the shine.

He hugs his arms tight around his bag and his brain buzzes under matted hair. His stomach groans, speaks of its desperation and yearn for attention and Dan thinks _fuck you, we’re all lonely_. Thinks of how he’s still not skilled in the art of compressing his needs. Thinks of _eating_ and _disorder_ and bul—

—lies at school. Word anatomies, connotation surgeries. And Dan’s mind runs like its at the centrepiece of Olympia, like its a piece of its treasure. Olympia, Olympia, bul-lshit letter sequences to communicate a disorder with intention but not certainty because the word is fucking ugly and Dan is terrified of everything.

He’s got his hands in his hair when some door opens and closes and opens and Phil’s sitting there in the driver’s seat with a bag on his lap. There’s a messy silence under the yellow sky. Dan’s pyjama shirt is hanging off his right shoulder and his skin looks like it’s been painted with pale acrylics.

Phil starts the car and he doesn’t say anything. Dan doesn’t want him to. Eighteen eighty three, some years ago. London is a terrible fucking city, in the grand scheme of things, and they’re driving through it as it stirs with a groggy morning consciousness.

Dan is a thirty something man, married and sick and lonely and he’s sitting in the passenger seat in space pyjamas of a shitty car that reflects the one-hit-success writer and his all-hit-failure husband. No money, no effort, no words. Phil’s pen has dried up—legacy faded—but Dan still reads over his novel when he’s longing for the pieces of him he’s not allowed to have and his heart goes home for a while.

“Where are we going?” Phil suddenly speaks, eyes on the road. He’s taken a right turn and a left. Dan thinks he’s probably alternating between the two.

“Airport.”

“I’m _sorry_?”

“Airport. Houses those big flying machines,” Dan’s voice has been filtrated and his amusement left behind, sloshy and prevalent.

“No, we’re—We’re not going to the _airport_. What the fuck?”

Dan pushes his face to the glass and imagines living in a world Van Gogh painted, rather than one he painted in. “I want to go to Paris. And Arles. I want to go to Arles.”

“We can’t afford to go to France and I’ve got responsibilities here,” Phil says. Little bumps and tiny fingers. “I’ll drop you at your mother’s.”

“No,” Dan jolts in his seat. “No, don’t you dare fucking take me there.”

“You said you wanted to—” Phil pinches the bridge of his nose as he drives. “We can’t go to France, Dan. This is too much.”

“Not.”

“What?”

“It’s not. It’s not too much,” His lips form ‘Arles’ and ‘Paris’ once more, right around ‘I want to go’ and Phil looks at him like he doesn’t know how to lift him back onto his fucking rocker.

“We can’t,” he mutters, hard and sincere. “Let’s just—Let’s go and get a coffee and talk about this.”

Dan shakes his head and forces, “No.”

“ _Dan_ —”

“No!” he yells, voice squeezing like a fist clenched and curled. Connections and crumbling drywalls and lined pieces of vodka bottles. He rubs his hands over his face and his palms are cold from being pressed against the window. “No fucking coffee, I want to go to the airport.”

But, _fuck_ , what he really wants is to ask Phil Lester if he thinks aliens are green and if he sees them in the galaxies over his chest and if he thinks about that time they laid together in a single bed when he can’t sleep. If he sees white shirts and thinks about wedding flowers stuffed up cuffs on blazers and if he believes repetition is insanity and words antiseptics, clothed with sterile textures to soothe gashed minds.

Phil doesn’t answer any of the questions and Dan assumes he hasn’t asked them. Then there’s a silence that comes to prickle in the air and act as a melody to the wrecked heads, plucking chords of gospel hymns and humming lullabies of forgotten days in which Phil traced patterns over Dan’s lower back. In single beds and behind lidded eyes, with white phosphenes imitating angels.

Phil drives them down to a café they haven’t been to in years. Dan wonders if this is where they came the day Phil kissed him for the first time. He’s angry he can’t remember. But there’s so much in his head that he feels like everything is spilling out his ears, like all his thoughts are clumped together with the stickiness of fresh reiteration.

When they pull up outside the café, Phil reaches and stuffs his bag onto the backseat before clambering out of the vehicle. Dan watches him walk around the front of the car with heavy eyes and open his own door, standing there under a yellow sky. They’re out of milk, maybe. He used the last on his hot chocolate last night and it’s still in the centre of the fucking sink.

“Get out of the car,” Phil says, urging. “I’m not playing around, Dan, get out of the fucking car or I’ll drive you to your mother.”

“You’re a dick,” Dan’s voice has been knitted with distance and delusion and the strength behind the threads is increasing. But he unbuckles his belt and steps out onto the pavement and he swears he feels the cool touch of the concrete on his feet until—

He looks down, and he’s wearing his shoes. Scuffed and beaten and Phil’s staring at him.

“Come on,” he says, and hooks his hand around Dan’s upper arm.

Dan immediately starts to thrash away— _fuck you, fuck you, love you_ —and Phil lets him go on instant. There’s nothing there, you see, and it’s horrible and it’s ugly and Dan can’t remember what colour his aliens are. Can’t remember if he even believes in them.

The café is small and quaint. There are paintings on the walls that make Dan’s head hurt. He doesn’t know where to look or what to want, so he just thinks about pouring yellow paint into white tubs as he wanders across with his fucking husband to a little table.

“Sit down,” Phil says, taking back a chair and gesturing through the words. Dan doesn’t even look at him and it’s better that way. The café is still small and still quaint and Phil Lester is still not wearing his ring. The sky is yellow. And it’s coming in little gleams through the window, fluttering over Dan’s acrylic skin and making everything look like it’s a little piece of a desperate painting, a little fragment of a freak’s imagination built with the taste of lead.

“And what kind-of fucking psychopath was Vincent Van Gogh—”

“Dan,” Phil Lester is suddenly there and he has beautiful eyes. Like the ocean and the tide and sometimes even the moments between the rushes of water. “Stop it. What are you having?”

Dan grunts something and thinks about how _literate_ sounds an awful lot like _carnivorous_. As if the ability to read and the ability to write pushes him out (like he’s on a tiny boat, sailing to the end of the world in his husband’s eyes) to the animal kingdom and fucking allows him to eat on the fleshy syllables of other writers. Because they’ll never be as good as _I’m working words from my insanity and they’re eating yours alive_ and they’ll never be as good as Dan Howell’s ability to murder enunciation and make it feel like a thousand injections of synthetic ecstasy whilst it bleeds you dry. They’ll never be as good as the man who wears space pyjamas to little, London cafés because he took your language and its trapeze so you couldn’t swing from the fucking branches of your communicative jungle and wrapped the rope tight around his throat. So it was a little like a _fuck you_ to his English teacher and a _fuck you_ to his husband because—

“I was always fucking better than you.”

“What?” Phil’s oceans are confused. Blue inked across the yellow; his eyes are the starry night over the Rhône. “My god, just tell me what you want. Tea? You want tea, yeah? Fucking Jesus, you’re having tea.”

“I don’t want tea.”

“I’m getting tea.”

Phil leaves. Dan stays. It’s a sequence, of sorts. Dan wants to apologise for a couple things in the moments he’s alone but he isn’t sure how to. He drums his fingers against the table and the tips form a beat that makes him feel like a poet. There’s a couple old women looking at him and he thinks about telling them their skin looks like paper, rolled and fucked around with and unfolded. Creased across the middle. He thinks about asking them if he can write on it because it’s always better to fight for it than to not have to fight at all.

But fuck it.

He doesn’t ask.

He sneaks his eyes under the table instead—because he swears he feels the panelled floor under his feet—and stares at his shoes. Scuffed and beaten. Bruised, like that time he made connections of _connected_ and _drywall_ and _nothingness_. Bruised. Purple, for Van Gogh’s irises. Because purple is the colour of insanity but only the best fucking people are.

But purple is also the colour of men who don’t know what to say so they buy mugs of tea and think too hard too often about green aliens and try to make sense of themselves with the tiniest streaks of wit. Purple is the home of big flying machines that drive straight through hardships—come hell or high water—to take you to where you’re intending to go. And Dan doesn’t think that he belongs there, in Paris and in Arles. He doesn’t think he belongs in a café a little past sunrise.

But he is where he is, and what the fuck kind-of artist is he if he doesn’t smear his ugly words over all the empty surfaces and all the plain canvases of still air? And what the fuck kind-of artist is he if he doesn’t make his agony no little or no more than a quatrain about an _I love you_ the middle of Manchester station? He’s got a slashed heart to let bleed and a universe to understand and Dan just wants to tell somebody that art is no little or no more than putting metal cuffs on creativity and torturing its last but one breath, so it comes up fucking fighting for the air you never let it have.

It’s being locked away behind closed shutters and under sheets sticky with sweat and in the monochromatic filters of hallway-silhouettes because you’ll start to spell _art_ like how you spell _breathe_. And the words and the colours will gush out of you like you’ve lost your mind, Dan thinks, but what a gorgeous fucking thing it is to be so deep in your own sanity.

People do weird shit to make them happy.

There are circus acts and acrobats skipping past the café window.

Dan watches them go.

He’s got sunflowers in his bag.

“Here,” Phil returns promptly (possibly, probably) with a mug of tea and a small plate for a sugary treat. “I bought one of their cakes, too. You haven’t eaten for too long, you’ll be ill or something.”

 _Ill._ Dan isn’t ill. Fuck that and fuck him. He’s no more ill than he is sane.

But the cake is just sitting there in the middle of the plate, regardless. Dan sees it grow a smile in its structure of sugar and fat and curl its lips up at him. He thinks of how he’s still not skilled in the art of compressing his needs. And there are bul—

—lies poured in with murmurs of Olympia like he’s too frightened to just say the fucking word and he wants you to draw them together like you’re Van Gogh drawing yellow onto petals and skylines. And like you’re a man out of his fucking head but simultaneously still in it, dragging a couple numbers and a ring of gold to sit too-close together.

“I don’t want that,” Dan says. _Olympia, Olympia, Olympia._ He’s got cold fingers pressed over his hot stomach. “I want to go to Arles.”

“Just drink your tea and eat your cake,” Phil replies. He isn’t even looking at him because he doesn’t do that a whole lot anymore and sometimes people do weird shit to make them happy. Sometimes people do weird shit to—

“I’m not eating the cake,” Dan argues. He scratches the area over his shoulder where the pyjama-fabric is rubbing his skin and the women start staring at him again.

“Yes, you are,” Phil says. He’s drinking coffee, hanging over the ledge of sobriety. “You want to, you know you do. You must be starving.”

“Not,” Dan peeks out of the window as his stomach groans and whines and _fuck you, we’re all lonely_. “I’m not.”

“Eat it, Dan,” Phil reaches forward and nudges the plate. “Just eat it. Fucking hell, it’s nothing.”

And Dan thinks about his mother and the sound of her voice through the weak hours of the morning and _I don’t know what to do with you anymore_ and _you’re going to die, Daniel, you’re going to die_. Scarred knuckles, scratched throats. It’s art at its finest, bul—lies and Olympia ringing out through a fucked and confused head. And the human mind has a will to understand, so sort the pieces and fix them into place. Bul, bul—

—ympia.

Dan’s stomach is churning. He’s thinking about granules of sugar and little streams of saliva when he reaches for the cake and his fingers are like needles on factory machines, working for the wage under the worked fingers. Dan is knocked sick from the moment there’s food on his tongue but the taste of sugar and sweeteners numbs the vomit in the back of his throat so it’s just yellow paint, sloshing there around his palate.

Dan’s mania sells homophones like they’re stashes of psychotherapy. And he’s eaten the cake before he’s eaten his regret because it’s a motherfucker, such noun, always missing its cue. It never comes when you need it.

“There,” Phil nods to the empty plate. Words are just divided immediate pauses made to interpret and communicate his loneliness. “Didn’t have to be such a big fucking deal, did it?”

There’s sugar smudged in the corner of Dan’s mouth. They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

And Dan’s yellow paint is, “I need the bathroom,” through a small and quaint café in which he may or not have come the day his husband kissed him for the first time. Teenage hormones stacked and overfilling in the spaces between his ribs, pouring out to mend his sick heart. Because Phil’s touch and Phil’s words used to wrap bandages around his scarred knuckles and drag lips along his scratched throat. And they built him a home of fleeting self-confidence that never told of its inconsistency and taught him how to speak in bullets because people listen to you when you’re holding a fucking rifle to their head. But now Phil’s touch is a punch in the gut and Phil’s words can’t even rise to protect against a trip to the bathroom.

People do weird shit to make them happy.

Dan thinks Phil understands that, like Dan thinks Phil understands everything. And they’re still fucking married, but marriage can’t save a boy from his mother’s statements of inconvenience and his friends’ passing comments of ‘the slightly bigger one.’

Dan joins _eating_ and _disorder_ , bul— and —ympia, and shoves two fingers down his throat. The sky is yellow. The world is sad. Kids can be cruel.

Dan has always been terrified of vomiting and he’s trembling there in the cramped cubicle, tears shaking in his eyes and he can’t remember what Phil’s arms feel like, can’t remember how to say _I love you_ without _you selfish fucking bastard._ Dan’s puking up the contents of the food that hasn’t settled, the calories that haven’t been calculated but as if he gives a _fuck_ about that. He’s just there regurgitating the words he choked on from his husband and his mother and his friends. There trying to be anything but a sad fucking imitation of a postimpressionist. 

He wants to go to Paris. He wants to go to Arles.

He wipes his mouth with toilet paper and thinks about little aliens. Then he flushes the chain and leaves the bathroom, and Phil’s still sitting there with his coffee. He’s gazing out the window and Dan breathes, “Was this where we came after we kissed for the first time?”

Phil gives his best attempt at ignoring the inflicted rawness in Dan’s voice. He knows, the selfish fucking bastard. He knows everything. Scarred knuckles, scratched throats. Dan wants him to wrap him in his arms and use his gift to whisper away the pain, but he doesn’t do that a whole lot anymore.

“No,” Phil shakes his head at the question. He is smooth and faultless and he fucked somebody else, but there’s nothing to say he did. “That was in Manchester. Don’t you remember? We’re in London, and that was in Manchester.”

“Oh,” Dan still feels sick. His throat is burning. “Right. Yeah. Right. Ye—”

“Stop,” Phil quietly urges. Dan stops, but starts again under his breath. Over and over and over and—

“What are we doing, then?” Phil Lester asks with unsteady fingers against a ceramic mug. He quickly retracts his hands at the patent declaration of weakness. “Back to the flat? Are you ready to go?”

“Arles,” Dan mumbles, firm. “Paris and Arles. Airport.”

“ _No_ , Dan,” Phil clenches his jaw and the movement is so sudden, Dan’s nausea bubbles higher. “We don’t have any goddamn _money_ and—”

“I have some, we have some.”

“Where?” Phil challenges. “In that wallet you have in your fucking space pyjamas?”

“In the _car._ There’s money in the car.”

“How is there? I haven’t earned fuck all for months now and unless you’ve managed to shoot up a bank in your delirious head, I don’t think—”

“I saved it, it’s in the glovebox,” It’s difficult maintaining a single thought. Dan would show Phil himself, but he’d probably start thinking about Jesus and walk to the fucking chapel the moment he left the building.

“How much do you have?” Phil’s still talking, and Dan’s still trying to be there with him in the café. He thinks of still things. Their love comes to rest in his mind.

“A bit. Enough for flights.”

“As if you have any idea how much flights are,” Phil stands to his feet and the chair’s sound jolts Dan. The man with the ocean eyes has the cityscape drawn around the shape of his shoulders and he has never been so far away.

Dan stands also, and follows him. He bumps his hip on a couple tables. “But if I have enough, can we go?”

Phil doesn’t answer. They head out and across the concrete and he opens the door, shuffles into the possible-passenger to crack open the glovebox.

“Do I have enough, Phil?” Dan asks. Over and over and his head is fucking spinning.

“How long have you been saving this? Why the fuck have you—You couldn’t have _told_ me you had this when we couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread?”

Sometimes the only way you can make a broken thing realise it’s broken is by putting it with another. 

“Do we have _enough_ , Phil?”

“Enough for, _what_?” Phil snaps. He slams the glovebox and Dan stumbles over his lack of balance, reaches for the door to stable his instability. 

“I want to go to France, Phil. Take me to France,” Dan’s voice is gnawing at a plea. Phil’s pushed his head into his hands and the sky is yellow and it’s all a mess of words and colours and Dan shoved two fingers down his throat three minutes ago. He’s wearing pyjamas. “We can go to France and I can show you things, Phil, I can—”

“I fucking _hate_ you,” Phil seethes.

Dan’s heart slices through it. “I fucking hate you, too. You fucked a girl and got her pregnant, don’t you think I just want to kick the shit out of you? But I—I just—Fuck, take me to fucking France. You selfish bastard, just take me to France.”

“We’re not going to _France_ , Dan!” Phil yells. He gets out of the car and pushes (with minimal force) on Dan’s shoulders, so he ducks into the car and takes his place.

“Phil,” Dan whimpers and reaches to grab his sleeve. “I want to go. It’s all I want, it’s all I want. Just take me for one day. Twenty-four hours. Nobody’s going to miss us.”

“I’m expecting a _child_ —”

“Not now,” Dan runs his hurting hands through his hair. “You’re not. You’re not right now. Ages yet. If you don’t come, I’ll go and I’ll leave and I’ll never come back to you and you’ll miss me more than you could ever love your fucking child.”

And everything is sad and everything is desperate. But Phil gets in the car and Phil drives them to the airport. There’s some time in between, but it’s not important. And they don’t even speak because they don’t even have to and Dan is too busy thinking about sunflowers to think about big flying machines. Sex on the tiles and bul—ympia and acrylic paint and bare fingers and sticky-out ribs. 

Puppet strings.

Dirty words.

Morality checks.

“I want to go to Arles.”

Eighteen eighty three.

Phil is probably angry because Dan is writing about him.

Phil is probably angry because Dan doesn’t have the right to anymore.

Phil is probably angry because he doesn’t know what to do and Dan is probably angry for that reason, too.

“We’re going to Arles, Dan.”


	3. Kick

**number three: kick**

They buy two plane tickets when they get to the airport. Straight to France, middle of Paris. The woman prints off the tickets and Phil silences Dan with a tight hand around his arm when he insists _no, no, I want to go to Arles._

“You’d have said Paris if I got some for Arles,” Phil mutters. “Just shut up.”

And then they get on this big flying machine, with their light luggage and their heavy heads and the sky isn’t really yellow anymore but it isn’t really blue either. It isn’t really green. It isn’t really red. It’s no little or no more than slightly grey, patterned with a hard white and a soft darkness. A divide. A concoction. Dan sits next to the window and Phil sits beside him and he watches the clouds as they roll by like dramatic and poetic phrases. Like they’re trying too fucking hard.

But it’s alright though, Dan thinks. The sky. It’s sort-of pretty, sort-of not. Sort-of hot, sort-of cold. Sort-of _I can reach you_ , sort-of _I wouldn’t even if I wanted to._ Sort-of _help me_ , sort-of _leave me_. Like somebody has opened a mind and let it balance all its weight and—

“Do you think the sky is pretty, Phil?”

Phil’s draping his jacket over Dan’s body, mumbling, “Shut up,” like his tongue is fucking stuck on it. Dan thrashes the touch and material away, and Phil pushes it back down.

“You’re wearing fucking space pyjamas, do you want them to think you’re a complete nutcase?” he remarks, cold and firm. Dan sits there and tries not to think about how his pain contrives illness and his illness contrives pain and how he had sex with Phil on the kitchen tiles and in a tiny single bed, two bodies cramped and scattered around, pushed right in where they fit. They were like organs there, bleeding from the slashes and trying to repair themselves with strips torn from each other. Like destroying somebody has ever been a way to fix yourself.

“Nutcase,” Dan tries the word and tastes the syllables. _Yellow, yellow, yellow_. He looks back out of the window and says, “I think the sky is pretty. But it’s ugly, too. Don’t you think? Phil. Don’t you think?”

“Shut up, Dan,” Phil retracts his hands and puts his face against them. The big flying machine is flying big and dangerous. Paris. Arles. Dan looks from the sky down to his fingers that were previously shoved into the back of his throat and wipes his hand against his jeans, just to make sure the salvia’s all gone. And then he does it again and then he does it again because three is nice and three is safe and it makes an ugly thing look pretty down on paper. Bul, bul—

—ympia.

“Phil,” Dan says.

Phil doesn’t look at him. He’s staring at his phone. “What?”

“Do you know Olympia?”

“I swear to God, if you start throwing a hissy fit over the fact we’re not going to _Greece_ —”

“We’re going to—” Dan struggles. Thinking, thinking, thinking, trained to think in galaxies. “Arles. We’re going to Arles?”

“We’re going to fucking _Paris_ ,” Phil hisses, under his breath. And then he leans his head back against the chair to rub his hands over his face. _Nutcase_. “Stop talking to me. Go to sleep.”

“But it’s not time to sleep yet,” Dan returns to the window and traces his finger over the glass. His organs bled over Phil’s fingers in a tiny single bed. “It’s not time to sleep yet. The sky is grey, Phil. Look at the sky, Phil, it’s pretty and it’s grey and it’s all these wonderful colours and it’s watching us, Phil, it’s—”

“Shut _up._ My god, just shut the _fuck_ up.”

And Dan thinks about Phil’s voice in the small hours of sunrise, smearing kisses damp with adjectives down the skin of his neck. Like _lovely_ and _soft_ and _beautiful_.

_Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful._

Things work well in threes.

Vincent Van Gogh painted a series of only two sunflowers, but it’s okay. He smeared them in yellow and it made up for the number. Because two is ugly and zero is ugly and nine is ugly, but pour yellow over their structure and they’re the most beautiful fucking numbers in the world. They’re the simplest and the greatest and it doesn’t fucking matter what they mean or what you think they do because—

“Yellow is my favourite colour.”

Dan’s drawing sunflowers on the pane of glass when he breathes the word yellow into the big flying machine. He thinks about the engine moving under him and along the twisting world, convoluting and spinning—the right way, maybe, but too fast. Or too slow. Dan does not see Jesus in the clouds and he does not even want to because fuck the people who aren’t there when you need them and fuck the nihilistic narrators. Fucking generic bastards, all _God does not exist_ and _Jesus did not either_ and Dan feels the kick of the words right in his stomach. Candied religion, sprinkled like sugar granules over a tongue because _heavenly_ is a too-appropriate ad—

—diction, too dramatic and too often treated like a little white flake. Different. Unique. Tumbling down over a sleeping city, to nest on car bonnets and underneath window ledges and manipulated on windscreens to spell out the simplistic syllables of _kids can be cruel_. Too-appropriate ad—

—diction from a child with a face like his father’s hit his mother, a child down a corridor chanting out the forgotten letters to remind _if you don’t know how to fix something, you have no right to break it._ And there’s a sequence, of sorts. In schools and in classrooms, where children are adults and adults are children because _fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do_.

And Dan’s smoking single file lines of little white flakes behind dirty school gates because he can make an ugly thing look pretty down on paper and they never taught him how to do that. Like they never taught him how to run his finger over his neighbour’s windscreen in the middle of the night and they never taught him how to put a marriage back together as if it’s made of building blocks and they never taught him how to not shove his fingers down his throat at the surface of the word _fat._

Candied religion. Generic bastards. _Kids can be cruel._

Dan runs his hands down his stomach and—

“Yellow is my favourite colour, Phil.”

Phil’s got his head in his hands and earphones in his ears. Dan thinks about running his fingers over the wire and gently taking one for himself, like he did when he was sixteen and they sat on his bedroom floor whilst his parents were out. _Yellow, yellow, yellow._

Dan’s psychiatrist tells him his heart wants to let go of what used to be and Dan tells him the worst thing about the word _divorced_ is that you can make it rhyme with _before_ and it hurts like the sound of grinding teeth between “I want you” and “I need you” and—

“I’ve never been in love.”

Phil Lester is playing music to ignore Dan Howell’s frequent, dramatic phrases.

But Dan doesn’t care. Sometimes the only way you can make a broken thing realise it’s broken is by putting it with another and a thirty-something man is hiding space pyjamas under a jacket because his husband told him to, even though his band of gold does not represent fuck all of what the poets say it does. Even though his words often become a little shitty when he fucks around with them too much, tries too hard to bend them into shape.

“Phil,” Dan pushes on Phil’s shoulder. His eyes are grey, like the sky. They’re looking at him. “I want to write. I want to write. I want to—”

“You can’t,” Phil mutters.

“I want to write.”

“You _can’t_ , Dan. Just go to sleep,” he stares at him. “You need to sleep.”

Dan wonders how long it’s been since Phil tried to convince him he knew what he needed. Dan wonders how long it’s been since he wrote a sentence so fucking awful, it sounded the same as everything else.

“Please, Phil,” he tries again. “I want to write.”

“ _Stop_ —” Phil clenches his jaw and his eyes flutter. “—saying the same thing. You don’t need to keep repeating it, you just—You just shut up. That’s it. Shut up.”

Phil says it like it’s supposed to be _I hate you._ And Dan can’t really figure out why he didn’t just tell him he did, like he can’t really figure out how he’s going to keep bleeding down onto a sheet of paper without boring the fuck out of himself. Because red isn’t yellow and red can’t be mixed with yellow because then it would just make some other fucking shade that Dan wouldn’t know and even if he did, he’d hate it.

Even if he did, he’d hate it.

Even if he did, he’d hate it.

“Please, let me write,” Dan whispers the words because he wasn’t taught how to think for himself, but he was taught that it’s better to do what you’re told. He whispers because he doesn’t want to wake the small baby sleeping on the chair beside Phil. Little bumps and tiny fingers. It’s a boy in a blue cardigan.

“I told you, you can’t. We’re done here. Just listen to me.”

“But I want to _write_ —” Dan gets up from the chair in the big flying machine and tries to move, so he can reach the place his bag is located above his head and—

“Sit _down_ , now,” Phil reaches for his wrists and pulls on them and Dan thinks about the time he touched his lips to the little bones and _I love you, I love you, I—_

“Stop it, Phil, get off,” Dan whimpers, and angrily jolts his arms. “Get off, get off, get—”

They had sex on the kitchen tiles with bottles of vodka and tired eyes.

“You’re causing a scene,” Phil’s teeth are clenched so hard, the words come all rough and broken-up. “Sit the hell back down, or I’ll get on the first plane back the moment we land.”

“You’re so—” Dan pushes on him and forces himself back down onto the chair. His heart is crying—water spilling over the slash—and the lady with the small boy is looking at him. “I hate you, Phil. You’re so nasty, you’re so horrible. Please, just let me get my book and—”

Phil tucks the jacket back in at his sides and turns away from him with a harshness. Dan whimpers and wraps his fingers around the material over him, pulling it to his tear-stung eyes and _it smells like you, Phil, it smells like you._

“I’m sorry,” Phil quietly apologises to the lady at his side. She returns something, but it’s too delicate and too gentle for Dan’s hard ears to understand.

“No, no. We’re fine,” Phil replies to the comment. _Fine, fine, fine._. “Sorry to bother you, again.”

He shifts his body slightly and glances away when he notices Dan’s eyes on him. They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. Little bumps and tiny fingers and they say Dan Howell is motherfucking insane.

“She’s got a little boy,” Dan notes, under his breath. He’s staring at the small creature and wondering how he’d feel wrapped in his arms. Delicate and precious and _yellow, yellow, yellow_. “He’s gorgeous, Phil, look at him. Look at him. He’s gorgeous. I want to write about him, I want to say things and—”

“He’s trying to sleep,” Phil has returned to ignorance. It’s blaring through his controlled and distant tone and people do weird shit to make them happy. “Just say them out loud. You don’t need to write.”

And Dan wonders where the fuck this Phil Lester has been hiding. This horrible and this nasty Phil, this one that tucks jackets under his arms because _space pyjamas_ sounds the same as _embarrassment_ and this one that believes writing is no little or no more important than saying shit out loud. Like Dan’s mind could ever connect with his tongue in the way it does with a page, spluttering over the white with rows and rows of black letters.

So he says, “I do,” and thinks about their vows. “I do, Phil, I—”

“You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t. It’s an addiction and it’s a bloody nasty kind,” Phil says. “Words are the equivalent of cocaine to a broken head. When you find a way to use them, you won’t stop until you’re dead. Providing you don’t find an alternative.”

And Phil hasn’t spoken to Dan like so for a long time. More than eight months. More than one year, more than two. Everything is gentle, suddenly, in Dan’s ears. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. The sky is grey. They’re on a big flying machine. Paris. Arles. Dan wants to cry, a little bit, because all of his organs miss Phil Lester like they’d miss his blood if it stopped pumping. His throat misses Phil Lester like it would miss his fingers if they stopped touching at the very back of its pallet. And the word addiction is there glaring over Dan’s face—in Dan’s eyes and in Dan’s smile—because his husband is the ecstasy his body aches for. Addiction. Addiction. Addiction.

Things work well in threes.

It’s a sequence, of sorts.

“I want to write though, Phil,” Dan returns to whispering. “It makes me feel okay.”

_Because you don’t anymore and I miss you so fucking much, I just want you to hold me and kiss me and call me a psychopath but tell me it’s okay to be. Fuck you, fuck you, love you._

“Just shush now, Dan,” Phil’s got his eyes closed. He reaches and puts his hand on Dan’s knee and squeezes once. Dan’s heart starts to pump the blood out of its slash faster, more aggressive, and he imagines water gushing from a drain. “Just shush. Please.”

It’s soft and it’s tired.

Dan’s tired, too. He puts his face in his hands and breathes into the spaces between his fingers. He wants to write about how Phil looks with his eyes closed and what his hand on his knee does to his stomach and how much he yearns to vomit the nothingness in there. Bul, bul—

—ympia.

Dan is terrified of everything.

The sky isn’t really yellow anymore but it isn’t really blue either. It isn’t really green. It isn’t really red. It’s no little or no more than slightly grey, patterned with a hard white and a soft darkness. A divide. A concoction. It looks like the cardigan on the tiny child beside Phil, and Dan is too fucking tired to describe how vulnerable he looks in his mother’s arms. He is too fucking tired to describe the feeling of an aching stomach and a husband’s hand on his knee.

And even if he did, he’d hate it.

: :

The big flying machine lands later that day. Phil keeps his hand around Dan’s arm as they file into the airport and move to collect their luggage. Dan is tired, and he sees shadows dancing in the weak corners of his eyes. He shuffles closer to Phil and says, “Don’t, please, go away.”

Phil ignores him.

There are sunflowers in his bag but he wants them against his chest.

“We need to get a cab to a hotel,” Phil’s tapping his fingers against his phone. They’re standing on a concrete pavement outside of the airport and Dan has the jacket over him. There are small gushes of wind slithering across the bareness of his chest, where the buttons on his pyjamas are not done-up. “My phone’s about to die, we need to be quick.”

“Quick, quick, quick,” Dan clicks his fingers three times. He runs his hands down his stomach and feels a tiny bump and tries to breathe with the weight. He looks up and thinks about the starry night and Van Gogh’s hurting, desperate hand from within the window of his asylum room. Thinks about Arles. Thinks about Paris. Thinks about Olympia. Thinks about how easy it is to not believe in God anymore and thinks about going to church. Nihilistic narrators. Fucking generic bastards.

“Hey, excuse me—”

Phil has stopped a young man with a coffee in his hand. It looks like a coffee. Or maybe it’s a hot chocolate. Dan’s stomach is churning. Dark blemishes in the bottom, smeared over the cream.

The starry night is beautiful and there are sunflowers in Dan’s bag. He wonders if he walks far enough into the sky, he will wind up on Van Gogh painting like a freak. Freak with a paintbrush and freak with a knife, running his tongue along the edges of each.

“Dan—Bloody hell, _Dan_!” Phil’s voice is distant in Dan’s ears. He looks down and his feet are shuffling over the concrete and Phil is suddenly there, hooking an arm around his shoulders and shifting him back. “Can you please just stand still? I’m trying get us a ride.”

And he moves back with Dan near him, apologising to the man with the coffee. The shadows return over his glossy eyes and he puts his hands over them, starts nodding his head to rock them away. _Help me, help me, help—_

“Okay, yeah,” Phil’s voice is the only one Dan’s ears seem accustomed to. The man is talking, but it isn’t important. Not enough for the fucking psychopath to grasp and hold against his attention. “Thank you so much, that’s really nice of you.”

“No problem,” The voice shocks Dan. It’s the man with the coffee. “You alright there, mate? I’m gonna give you a lift to a hotel nearby.”

“Arles,” Dan mutters. Over and over and over. “I want to go to Arles.”

“No, Dan, we’re in Paris,” Phil holds his arm again. “I’ve told you.”

“Is he okay?”

Fucking _okay_. Fuck that. Fuck that, Dan thinks, because he isn’t draining himself of blood and letting it pour over a page. Phil won’t allow their fingers to be wrapped together and the sun isn’t shining, sky isn’t yellow. Life is still, but Dan’s head is spinning. Things work well in threes, even though there are never three letters written consecutively. He isn’t fucking okay but he will be when he can stuff his index and his middle past his tongue and choke on them, chanting out three divided words like he can’t just fucking say bul— 

“He’s fine,” Phil says.

“I want to see Van Gogh,” Dan is looking at the man through a distorted vision. “Van Gogh, do you know him? Van Gogh. Vincent Van Gogh. Do you believe in aliens?”

“I’m sorry, he’s—” Phil is shaking his head. “He’s out of his fucking mind, I’m sorry.”

“I know Van Gogh,” The man nods. He doesn’t seem to mind the fact that Dan Howell is out of his. “What’s your favourite painting, buddy?”

“Painting,” The word rolls from Dan’s tongue like clouds through the sky. Paint—ing. “He used to eat yellow paint. On his paintbrush. Painted with it and ate it. Do you believe in aliens? Sir? Do you believe in aliens?”

“Sure, buddy,” The man says. Another nod. Dan wonders what his brain looks like. “I believe in aliens.”

“What colour are your al—”

“Come on, Dan, stop it now,” Phil interrupts. They’re still fucking married. “We need to get to a hotel and get some rest. This man is happy enough to give us a ride, don’t blow that.”

The man smiles and Dan likes it. He’s got the sun’s shine around the edges of his lips and the shadows cast themselves over the vulnerability. “You’re alright, aren’t you, buddy? I’m Louis.”

“I’m Dan,” Dan replies. He starts tugging at the edges of his pyjamas and Phil moves to stand before him, zipping up the heavy jacket. “I’m Dan and this is Phil. Phil. Phil, he’s my husband.”

“You guys are married?”

“Yeah,” Phil steps back again. He’s uncomfortable and the sky is yellow again, hanging above the city of Paris. “A while now. Bit complicated. We’re working through some stuff.”

“He had sex with somebody else and he’s going to have a child with tiny fingers and he won’t let me write,” Dan thinks about threes and Jesus and Van Gogh. And Phil’s nose against a woman’s throat. And _nutcase, nutcase, nutcase._

It doesn’t matter a whole lot what’s happening around Dan’s head, on the outskirts of his filthy and his twisted imagination. Dirty hands and puppet strings. It matters only that he’s so deep into his own fucking insanity that he doesn’t even register the fact he’s sitting in the backseat of this Louis’ car until they start driving. It’s all very smooth and careful along the roads. All very _Van Gogh painted here_ and _this is the city of love._ And Dan just thinks maybe the whole thing is a lie. Like the only reason love doesn’t exist is because a deranged boy’s marriage is in shambles and the ash is all over his hands, like it’s shattered and it’s broken and he can’t remember where to find the glue because he can’t fucking remember anything. He can’t even fucking remember that if you don’t know how to fix something, you have no right to break it. That Van Gogh painted an oil painting in eighteen . . . eighteen . . . eight—

—months without talking. Two hundred and forty three days, on average. But Dan doesn’t care. Dan doesn’t fucking care. He can still feel Phil’s hand on his knee and Phil’s arm around his shoulders and Phil’s touch across his stomach. Phil on the kitchen tiles and Phil in the single bed and Phil is the breath in his motherfucking lungs, but the shadows have their hands around his neck and he can’t breathe. Driving down those roads in Paris with Phil Lester and this man, Louis, Dan Howell cannot breathe.

It’s like that time he was fourteen and he smoked through his ad- like verbs, like the prefixes of descriptive words that were soaked through his skin as if he’d been baptised in them. As if the vicar had poured soluble syllables over his little head in the name of Lord Jesus Christ. Christened him. Created him. Built him of a broken language rather than a holy one. And now it’s just consistent of _God does not exist_ and _Jesus did not either_ and Dan can’t fucking exist with the twists of withdrawal in his stomach. 

Like he’s aching for a fix.

Like he’s aching for a kick.

Sometimes he thinks he can smoke a couple ad-s and write until his eyelids collapse right on top of him, but he never often can. Because Van Gogh once said, “Paintings have a life of their own that derives from a painter’s soul.” And Dan just wants to write ugly words that people think are beautiful and people think are paintings because each little letter is each little swirl of colour. Each little letter is each little blade to stab into your chest and the distant cries of _no violence, no violence_ will continue to ring out because _fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do._ Dan’s armed with angry words and ‘inappropriate’ attitudes and like he gives a _fuck_ what they think of him when he’s loading bullets and firing them without even moving his finger. Like he gives a _fuck_ who’s good and who’s said to be the greatest because _holy shit_ , this isn’t a way to pass the time. It isn’t a couple sentences today and a couple sentences tomorrow; it’s no little or no more than a passage about Vincent Van Gogh and a passage about yellow paint and a passage about Jesus because sometimes sad writing just makes that okay.

Sometimes you can manipulate the art of writing to make it so beautiful that a _fuck you, God_ is the equivalent of a _love you, always_ to a priest. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many times you splatter down curse words in a single sentence because they’ve got your blood all over them and people are going to fucking _listen_ to you if you make them. And Dan can work with language like a chef can knives, slicing and dividing and _fuck, fuck, fuck_ because he’ll never say anything if he doesn’t believe it.

They’ll know if you don’t. Like they’ll know if you’re a master or if you’re a phoney, if they’re crying or they’re empty or you’re scribbling about glossy romances or men with dead hearts driving down French roads. If you’re writing in compounds or rhyming unconsciously.

If you can blurt seven fucking paragraphs on a single train of thought. A quatrain in Manchester station and a kiss on an open mouth, salvia stringed with vodka and _look at me when you_ —

There say there are never any lost souls in Paris, like they say it’s the city of that funny old thing. And Dan wants to go to Arles but he wanted to go to Paris once and he thinks if he tasted yellow paint, he’d just want to taste green. So he shuts the fuck up and he _thinks_ because it’s what he does best. Paris, Arles, yellow. Bul, bul—

—ympia.

Things work well in threes.

And Dan’s never been good with numbers but he counts the heads in the car and repeats the thought again and again and then tries to draw the attention away from reality like he’s Van Gogh, or some shit. He cradles the situation against his chest and murders his insanity with his gift, laying out his anger and his pain in these big clumps of words that make no little or no more sense than just sitting there and slashing his wrists. 

Dan is tied down to crucifixion and Pontius Pilate as the car rolls down the streets but they say Jesus never lived, so how the fuck could he _die_? They say nihilistic narrators are just fucking generic bastards and a man with a confused heart will do much nicer than a violent, or even a peaceful one. Because there’s no love and there’s no peace in the chants of tragic writing. There’s not fucking supposed to be and Dan can fucking say so because maybe he just fucking _invented_ it with those ugly words he made beautiful.

Maybe good is not good until you give it some bad. And maybe the only way you can name a broken thing realise it’s broken is by putting it with another. And maybe the stars don’t shine for your success, they shine for your misfortune.

Like—

“You like to write, Dan?” Louis is peeking through the darkness of the vehicle to the man on the backseat, mumbling phrases under his breath. “Phil says so. Says he does, too. Never realised he was _the_ Phil Lester. The one that wrote that book . . . ”

. . . _about the wonderful adventures of a kid across the solar system._

Dan does not fucking care for Phil Lester’s novel as they drive through Paris.

And Phil does not fucking for Dan Howell’s failure, for his lack of recognition.

“I write,” Dan says. He’s playing with a longer stand of his hair, curling it around his finger to imitate his ring. Zero and nine. “I write. I write. Better than him.”

“He writes a bunch of stuff,” Phil retaliates. “But publishers aren’t looking for that and they never will be and he can’t handle it. He’s never been able to. They don’t want confusing trails of tragic words, they want plot and they want story.”

There are shadows bunching up in Dan’s frontal lobe, where his parents mistakes are nudging their knuckles. “You’re no better than me,” he says, cold. “Fuck you, you’re no better than me.”

“I didn’t say I _was_.”

“Good, because you’re _not_ ,” Dan’s heart kicks out his defence. “It’s a published book with age-old decent sales, don’t flatter yourself. You’re just jealous of me.”

Phil shifts in the front seat. “ _I’m_ jealous of _you_?”

“Fuck you,” Dan echoes. “I could murder your libretto with a _noun_.”

“Hell,” Louis laughs. “He’s got a voice and a half, hasn’t he? That’s it, Dan, you use your words.”

And Dan just wants to go to sleep. He doesn’t care enough to hear Phil’s agitation and Louis’ occasional comments. He’s better than him and he always has been and yet he’s never going to be anymore than the one Phil Lester married and the one Phil Lester divorced without divorcing. He’s never going to have a copy of sad words on a shelf because nobody would pick it up and nobody would even _want_ to. 

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

Dan curls up on the backseat of a moving car in space pyjamas and his husband’s jacket. His stomach is groaning. His fingers are shaking. He wants to write about the black sky. He wants to write about Jesus Christ. He wants to write about his school days. He wants to write about his mother. 

But they say he doesn’t know what art is.

And even if he did, he’d hate it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt like this was a bad chapter, minus the odd couple of paragraphs I was proud of. Idk this story makes me so self-conscious but I adore writing it at the same time. What do you think?


	4. Elastic

**number four: elastic**

_The_ hotel room in Paris would be different to Dan’s expectations if he bothered to have them. But he didn’t, and so it isn’t. It just _is_. The wallpaper is floral and peeling in the corners and the carpet is an empty beige. There are two single beds and a connected bathroom. There’s a record player on a little dresser and a window that opens to the city, taped with white and lace curtains but it’s all quite irrelevant.

Dan doesn’t care a whole lot.

It’s late when they arrive. The sky isn’t yellow. Everything is still and he fucking hates silence.

Louis departs after showing them to a room, commenting that his father owns the hotel or some shit like that. It doesn’t matter and it never will. Dan is so fucking tired and hungry and he keeps thinking of how he’s still not skilled in the art of compressing his needs.

“Get into bed,” Phil says. His voice is slick with sleep. “I’m exhausted and so are you. Fucking _Paris_.”

It’s like he still can’t believe it or something. He needs to just get the fuck over himself or something.

Dan starts walking and dragging his hand over the floral paper and Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Van—

“You need your meds,” Phil drops the bag he’s been carrying onto one of the beds and opens the zipper. Dan wonders if he’s aching for a drink. “I packed them for you, take them. It’s your responsibility.”

“I don’t need them,” Dan says. He rubs his fingertips over his eyelids and sees sunflowers. There’s a pair of boots in the corner of the room. Eighteen eighty six. He wants to rearrange them to look like the painting, all tangled laces that stretch and weave and _noose_ rhymes with _loose_ and _chronic_ with _ironic._

Elastic and alcoholic.

Bully—

—mic.

“Yes, you do,” Phil walks and places them on Dan’s bedside table. “Take them and sleep. You need them and you know you do and I went to the effort of bringing them, so just fucking take them.”

And then he tosses the bag on the floor.

“I don’t want to take them, Phil,” Dan says. It’s a little bit sad and a little bit pathetic. “Please. I don’t want to take them.”

“Then just—Jesus, just get into _bed_ , Dan,” Phil snaps. He’s angry when he tears back the bedsheets and pushes Dan down onto the mattress. Dan whimpers and watches him as he kicks off his shoes, shuffling into his own bed after switching off the lights.

Dan is terrified of the dark.

It reminds him of the inside of his closet. His mother’s screaming, his father’s screaming, his brother’s crying. Dan’s psychiatrist tells him his parents’ mistakes have grown fingers and they’re tampering with his brain but what Dan’s psychiatrist means is that he is struggling through a messy divorce with his third wife and he doesn’t need a patient refusing to answer his questions. He doesn’t need a man who keeps talking about a postimpressionist like he’s saved his fucking life and about weird figures that come for him in the dead of the night because they’re not fucking _real_. Dan’s psychiatrist says they’re not and so does Dan’s husband, but who the fuck are they to tell him what is and isn’t real?

Sometimes the only real aspects of a person’s life is what isn’t real. But Dan knows that doesn’t matter to anybody but him. He knows a lot of shit doesn’t matter to anybody but him.

In the darkness of the Paris hotel room, he lays and he thinks. About the pain of resting on his left side and then moving to his right, and the agony of his stomach against the mattress because of his inconvenient ribs. About how they’re just bones nobody fucking wants. About how sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy and the only way you can ever understand yourself is to know who you are when nothing remains of everybody else. In the darkness, Dan tells himself he is the only person on the planet and that the stars are shining for his misfortune.

And he has been crazy long before he started documenting it. Crazy long before his mother kicked her heels into his locked bedroom door and emptied their house of pills and lengthy cords. Long before his father fucked off into the motherfucking sunset to motherfucking find himself. Long before _a boy needs a father to keep him grounded_ and _you’ll never survive on your own._ And Dan has been crazy long before they named him a piece of shit and long before he stuck two fingers down his throat and long before he tasted lines of coke and dilated pupils and—

— _Eight months clean, mom, eight months clean, clean, clean._

Sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint and the inside of Dan Howell’s head looks like a bomb somebody has tried to defuse but cut all the wrong wires. Like rats have got to it, or something. Like _stop using fucking similes, it’s a reflection on your state of mind._

And it’s in the darkness that Dan curls up in a ball and cries into his hands, as his stomach tightens and demands for attention and the shadows come to whisper bedtime stories of ugly skin and ugly tears in his ears. Weight, stomach, scales. Preferred size. Little bit less, little bit more. He is too fucking tired to explain the effect of magazine articles and childish voices. Too fucking tired to outline the causes of bul—ympic gold medalists and hurdles and crowds and TV screens. Too fucking tired to draw Xs on his wrists like he wants pirates to come and use shovels on the skin. _Xanax, Xanax, X—_

—marks the spot.

Dan is too fucking tired to explain that you can stretch elastic as far as it’ll go but it’ll never not return to its original shape.

The wallpaper is floral and peeling in the corners and the carpet is an empty beige. There are two single beds and a connected bathroom. There’s a record player on a little dresser and a window that opens to the city, taped with white and lace curtains and the room is fucking _black._ Dark and nothing.

Dan gets up from his bed with wet eyelashes and tight fists around soft fabric. There’s a man sitting on the little dresser with an unhinged jaw and broken skin and Dan is fucking terrified of everything. His heart settles into a calmer sea when he finds the light in the bathroom and sits on the tiled floor. His hands are shaking. His chest is rattling. His stomach is groaning.

“Daniel.”

Dan’s attention shatters and fires up at the woman standing in the centre of the cramped room like she’s lit a match and thrown it at him.

“Mom,” he croaks, and starts shaking his head. “Fuck, no, mom—”

“What the hell are you doing?” she yells. Her eyes are hard. Unsympathetic and cruel and _stop being pathetic, Daniel. Eat your bloody dinner_. 

“I—” he’s crying again, not sure if he stopped. “I’m sorry, mom, I—Please, I’m sorry.”

“You’re a _disgrace_ ,” she seethes. Her fingers are tight in fists and her teeth are clenched. “Get off the floor.”

Dan is shaking his head and hugging his knees to his chest and his legs are so thin, scraggly and painful and his stomach is pulling like it’s fucking elastic. You can stretch it as far as it’ll go but it’ll never not return to its original shape and it’s ugly and it’s beautiful and—

“You’re _disgusting_ ,” The figure reflecting Dan’s mother is chanting and yelling and they’re in a fucking hotel room in Paris. Dark and light. Puppet strings. Dirty words. Morality checks. “You’re pathetic and you’re ridiculous. Do you think I need this right now? Do you think I need you starving yourself? Life doesn’t revolve around _you_ , Daniel, I’m trying to manage—”

“I’m sorry,” Dan sobs. Eighteen eighty three. Big flying machines and a bestselling novel and _fuck you, you’re not better than me._ People do weird shit to make them happy. “I’m s-sorry, mom, I’m trying to—I swear, I-I’m trying, I don’t m-mean to—”

“Dan?” There’s another voice outside the door and Dan’s curled in a ball on the cold tiles. He doesn’t care for it and he doesn’t want it. He’s going to puke his fucking guts up and his head is spinning and there are black dots in his eyes and bul, bul—

—ympia.

“Dan?” The voice comes a second time. “Who the fuck are you talking to? Dan?”

And then maybe the door opens or maybe it doesn’t and Dan’s mother is still there muttering insults in his ears and the shadows are poking and jabbing at his stomach. Nutcase. A zero and a nine under a band of gold. Nutcase.

“Fucking hell, Dan.”

There are hands on Dan’s shoulders and forcing under his arms, lifting him up to lean against the wall. “Dan,” It’s Phil. “What are you doing? Why are you—Jesus, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Don’t shout at me,” Dan can’t decipher a whimper for a scream. A dead man for a live one or a writer for a painter. Happiness for sadness. Sadness for sickness. Fragility for confidence and love for hate. “Don’t shout at me. Don’t shout at me. Please, Phil, don’t—”

“What are you _doing_ , Dan?” Phil has his grip on Dan’s wrists. Tight because he’s irritated, but soft because he’s Phil. He puts the back of his hand to Dan’s forehead and _love you, love you, love you._ “Why are you sweating? Why are you crying? What’s happened?”

“I-I’m _sorry_ ,” Dan chokes. The ends of his hair are damp, skin drenched and body hot and he’s going to fucking vomit. His stomach is crying for food and he’s sickly light-heated and— “It hurts so bad, Phil, it—”

“Dan, fucking hell, you’re—” Phil is kneeling in front of him when he rubs his hands over his face. There’s a slouch of exhaustion to his shoulders. “You’re such a mess, you’re such a fucking mess. Come on, get up.”

And he stands to his feet and reaches to hold onto Dan’s arms. “Come _on_ , Dan,” he begs, strong and desperate. They had sex on the tiles and his tongue tasted like vodka. “You’re not fucking helping yourself and you know you’re not and, _Jesus_ , you’re gonna die if you don’t listen to me.”

“Phil,” Dan sobs his name.

“ _What_ , Dan?”

“My mom was here—S-She—Did you see her? She was h-here, did you see her?”

Little bumps and tiny fingers. Van Gogh and Paris and Arles. Sunflowers. Dead hearts down dead French roads. Sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy.

“You’re bat-shit fucking crazy,” Phil is talking under his breath. Over and over and over. “I don’t know what to do with you, Dan, I—She wasn’t here, your mother wasn’t fucking here.”

“She—”

“No,” Phil interrupts with harshness. “She wasn’t. You know she wasn’t, stop fucking around—”

“Fuck you!” Dan cries. “Fuck you, Phil, I _hate_ you! She was here and she was s-screaming at me again and fuck you for letting her!” 

“How the _fuck_ am I supposed to stop her coming in your imagination?” Phil spits. “How the _fuck_ is it my fault you’re such a goddamn psychopath? _How_ , Dan? How? How can I protect you from the shit you make up? Haven’t we already established that I can’t fucking save you from _yourself_?”

“You keep making me hurt, too,” Dan’s biting down onto his fingers like he’s trying to regain some control, if he even fucking had it in the first place. “It’s your fault, too. You hurt me, too.”

“This is a fucking joke,” Phil starts moving over to the door that he left ajar. The wood is weak and old. “I can’t believe you’re still blaming me for this. I’m here in fucking _Paris_ for you. I’m expecting a child but I’m still standing here. And you have the nerve to blame me? You know what, Dan, just do what the hell you want. I don’t care about you.”

_I don’t care about you. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about you._

Things work well in threes. There is no room in his busy head to be in love anymore and even if there was, he probably wouldn’t be. Because their marriage is not a marriage and their hearts have left one another alone and Dan still has his zero and his nine but like fuck does he care for them.

_I don’t care about you._

Dan fucking hates Phil. He fucking hates him. It’s his fucking fault. It’s his mother’s fucking fault. It’s his father’s fucking fault. But mostly fucking Phil’s, the selfish fucking bastard. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._ Dan hears the bathroom door go and he just wants to scream _if you’d have loved me better, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad._

But instead his voice comes frightened and horrific and like it used to after his mother watched him eat every crumb on his plate when he says, “I’m so fucking sorry that it’s so hard to love me.”

And the bathroom light is burning, ignited over his head. The room is soft and silent and empty and there isn’t a mug in the sink. No dark blemishes, no milk in the sky. Dan Howell is slumped against the wall of a tiny bathroom in Paris, and his husband fucking hates him and his mother fucking hates him. His loneliness is resting in the moments of nothing like it’s building a home in its vacancy. It’s cramped in somewhere beside his insanity, pushed right in because it fits. His feelings are organs and his chest fucking hurts.

Acute mania with generalised delirium.

Dan just wants to fall asleep in Phil’s arms in the tiny single bed. He just wants to go to fucking Arles. He just wants to buy his husband all the liquor he desires with words he can rhyme because of agonies he can define. He’s a poet, or some shit. He’s yellow and he’s grey and he’s green. He’s the moments between conjuring a sentence and vomiting it down on a page. And his world is spinning the right way, maybe, but it’s spinning too fast. Or too slow. There are cold, Paris bathrooms at eternity’s gate and full fucking stops are just full fucking irrelevant because Dan hasn’t taken his meds but maybe he can connect his heart to life-support with connectives. And he doesn’t know where his bag is, doesn’t know where his pen is, and he feels like the day he did he lost his mother in the supermarket. As if the woman that carried him and the woman that hurt him is the woman that raised him on sludges of ink. She is the seconds he’s forgotten that his writing is no little or no more than morphemes for pain, straitjackets and adjectives and _fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do._

Dan wouldn’t hate it if he died.

And Phil wouldn’t hate it if he tried.

And sometimes what you do just has to be your responsibility.

But what you don’t has to, too.

: : 

Dan wakes up on the bathroom floor. He’s slouched against the wall in space pyjamas and there are little Xs on his wrists and his stomach is hurting. His eyes are tired. His chest is tight. The sun is gently weaving these little glistens through the window, over the bridge of Dan’s nose. It’s early morning, he can decipher in his premature consciousness.

The light is still on in the bathroom. He gets up just to switch it off, and he likes the way the currents of electricity feel beneath his skin. Then he likes the way Louis’ voice sounds with Phil’s outside the door, so he pushes on the handle with his thin fingers and creeps out.

Puppet strings.

Dirty syringes.

Two men drinking gin and smoking cigarettes. The air is choking with it and Dan wants to be sick and he has been crazy long before he tasted lines of coke and dilated pupils and—

— _Eight months clean, mom, eight months—_

_Since we spoke._

“Morning, buddy,” Louis says. There’s smoke tumbling out of the corners of his mouth. He’s strong-accented and softly-crafted. “How are you feeling?”

“I slept in the bathroom,” Dan holds his arms up to the weak light from outside and his pyjama-sleeves tumble down the skin. There are two Xs there and he can feel Phil’s lips against the bones. He searches for the man in the room, and finds him facing the window. He’s got a bottle of alcohol in his right hand and a cigarette between his lips and he looks like a mess that a shitty writer tried to make pretty.

“Phil told me you didn’t take your meds last night,” Louis is talking again. Probably. “They’re shit, aren’t they? Dan? They’re shit, aren’t they?”

Dan says the sentence again in his head.

And then, “Do you believe in aliens, Louis?”

“Yeah, Dan,” Louis smiles. “I believe in aliens.”

“What colour are they? Your aliens. What colour are they?” Dan taps two fingers against the side of his leg. “What colour are they?”

“Orange, I think,” he answers. “Like the sunset.”

“Orange,” Dan whispers. O-range. He taps two fingers against the side of his leg.

“Yeah,” Louis nods. He’s still smiling and smoking his cigarette and his lips are thin around his bottle of liquor when he exchanges it with Phil. “Do you like orange?”

“I like orange, Louis. Orange is nice.”

Louis is French and orange and kind on the bed. Dan thinks he’s so lovely. “What colour are your aliens, buddy?”

“ _My_ aliens,” Dan doesn’t know. Dan can’t remember. Dan feels sick and Dan wants Phil to kiss him. “ _My_ aliens are—Well, Louis, they’re—Green. Yellow. Van Gogh’s are yellow. Did you know? His aliens are yellow.”

“Yellow?” Louis echoes. He’s moving around the room and he’s got his hand on Dan’s back but Dan’s heart is with colour and his head with Van Gogh. He sits on the bed, maybe, and Louis sits with him. “Is that because he used to eat it?”

“He used to eat yellow paint,” Dan nods. He’s gentle and he’s happy. Enthusiastic and elastic and alcoholic. “You remember. He used to eat yellow paint. Yellow for his sunflowers.”

“Ah,” Louis has a bottle of water and a closed palm and he’s put his gin on the floor. His cigarette is in his other hand, maybe. Dan doesn’t care. Clean. “So you know that one then? Van Gogh and his sunflowers. Is it your favourite?”

“It’s yellow,” Dan has crossed-legs and space pyjamas and thin hands in his lap. “It’s delicate. He used to eat yellow paint. It made him happy.”

“Did it?”

“He painted it in Paris, Louis,” Dan says. Dead hearts down dead French roads. “Eighteen eighty seven. Did you know?”

“I did, buddy,” Louis is still sitting next to him. Water bottle. Closed palm. “And then the next in Arles. Eighteen eighty eight.”

“Yeah,” Dan is moving and the bed is squeaking. “Yeah, Louis, yeah. You got it. Paris and Arles.”

“I was an art student years ago. It was the greatest time of my life. Do you know why Van Gogh painted his sunflowers?”

“Sunflowers. He used to eat yellow paint, Louis, and he painted sunflowers for Paul Gauguin.”

“Gauguin, that’s it,” Louis laughs. There’s no man on the dresser anymore. “You know Gauguin. His friend. Can you take these for me, buddy?”

Pills.

Water.

Dan’s sleeves are over his hands and he can’t see the Xs.

“Nothing but sunflowers,” Louis says, and it’s softer and it’s quieter and he puts the pills inside Dan’s scarred knuckles. “Van Gogh painted them for decoration in a guest room. They were for Gauguin and they were yellow.”

“Yellow,” The word is warm on Dan’s tongue.

“For Gauguin because he liked him,” Louis puts the bottle of water in Dan’s weak hands. “And for himself because he liked it. Is that why his aliens are yellow, Dan?—”

Dan’s eyes are there on Louis’ open hand for half a second, fingers around the cool bottle of water and the pills are strange on his scratched throat.

“—Because he liked it and it made him happy?”

“It made him happy. It made him happy and it—It made him happy,” Dan stops and rubs his mouth over his sleeve. Phil’s watching him with ocean eyes and Dan wants to take a boat out onto the waves. Dan wants to kiss him until he can’t breathe. Dan wants to be so fucking in love that the stars shine for it and Van Gogh painted for it and his veins are blue for it. His stomach aches for it. Jesus died for it. He cuts his wrists for it, just so somebody’ll tell him that isn’t what it’s about. Like somebody told Van Gogh happiness wasn’t about lead poisoning and painting wasn’t about madness. And somebody told the priest heaven wasn’t about hell. And somebody told the addict addiction wasn’t about rehab. But Dan wants to be so fucking in love that there’s beauty in blood and there’s sickness in writing and it doesn’t matter what they think because they just don’t _get it._

They just don’t get it.

They say insanity is repetition when the point’s already been made. But maybe what they mean is insanity is just trying to depict insanity through little breaks of repetition and just trying to show that there’s beauty in the slashes all over a broken marriage. There’s love in the pain and there’s hate in the love. They fucked on the floor and they fucked in the bed and Dan stuck two fingers down his throat after Phil bought him a cake and Dan strung paintings on his wall after Phil stopped sleeping with him and—

Fuck that and fuck him.

 _Fuck this and fuck you._

Dan used to say things when he was a kid because he knew that people would say things back. And he knew that nobody ever fucking understood him, so he inked words on the front pages of his maths book and he told his mother he didn’t love her and he poked his ribs until he was sure they were broken and he called it _art._

He failed English and he called it art.

He ruined his marriage and he called it art.

He chanted _you just don’t fucking get it_ and he called it art.

They say Dan Howell is motherfucking insane. And they say Phil Lester motherfucking hates him. And they say you can ruin anything but if you have the words to make it gorgeous, then who the _fuck_ cares?

Still, Dan thinks. Somebody’ll tell him that isn’t what it’s about.

“Dan,” Louis has his hand on his shoulder. “Dan, buddy, are you good?”

“I’m good, Louis,” Dan says. There are Xs and there are galaxies on his wrists. “I’m good. I want to be good. I’m good.”

“You should finish that water,” Louis gestures to the bottle. “I know it’s plain and clear and boring, but it’s good. Like you.”

“Things work well in threes, Louis,” Dan is counting on his fingers. _One, two—_ “My mom came last night.”

“Your mother?” Louis repeats.

“No,” Phil’s voice is hoarse from the smoke and strong in the air. He’s still facing the city. “She didn’t.”

“She _did_ —”

“No, she _didn’t_. She didn’t come, Dan,” Phil shakes his head. “You were scared and you slept on the floor and you shouldn’t have done, but you did. You were on your own and it fucked you up. Probably. Your mother never came.”

“But I _saw_ her, Phil,” Dan is trying and there’s poetry in it and it’s no little or no more than a fucking tragedy. “I _spoke_ to her. She came to see me.”

Phil shakes his head—like he doesn’t want to argue—and takes a drag of his cigarette.

Louis pokes Dan’s arm. “What did she say to you, buddy? Your mother. What did she say?”

“She shouted at me, Louis,” Dan feels stinging in his eyes and rubs his hands over them. “She shouted at me real fucking bad and—She made me cry. She made me cry and she—Phil left me, Phil doesn’t love me—Ask him, Louis, ask him if he loves me—”

Phil is facing the window and the muscle in his jaw is flexing. Dan fucking hates him and he wants to fall asleep on his lap. He wants them to lay together in the single bed and trace their fingers over sentences printed on murky pages. _A novel by Phil Lester_ and a kiss against a throat, an arm around a waist and a bestselling smile. Drawn curtains over Phil’s head, damp hair from the shower. A little bit of _love you_ and a little bit of _always_ and _ask him if he loves me, Louis._

Dan doesn’t know what’s happening, but Phil Lester is walking out of the room. The door closes softly on his exit and Dan whimpers, brings his knees to his chest and lays on the bed.

“Hey,” Louis says. “He’ll be back soon, buddy. Promise. How about we go and get you some breakfast? There’s a little café down the road and—”

“No, Louis, no,” Dan is shaking. “I don’t eat. I don’t eat. I want Phil, I don’t eat. Let’s talk about the s-sunflowers.”

“I’m gonna get you some breakfast, Dan,” Louis starts organising himself, lights another cigarette.

“He’s drunk, Louis. He’s out and he’s drunk and—”

_You’re a fucking mess too, you piece of shit._

Elastic and alcoholic and _if you’d have loved me better, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad._

Fists in drywalls. Bottles of vodka on the bottom shelf. Desperate hands against torn pieces of paper. Broken wires and rhyming syllables, afterthoughts in brackets and morphemes and straitjackets. Homophones and homophobes and _I hate you when you love me._

Sometimes the only way you can make a broken thing realise it’s broken is by putting it with another.

But they just don’t get it.

Nobody fucking gets it.

“I’ll look for him and I’ll bring him back with some food for you,” Louis tucks the bedsheets in around Dan’s body. Phil’s jacket is further up the bed and Dan doesn’t remember taking it off. He wraps it in his arms and buries his nose in the sleeve.

Dan Howell is broken and Phil Lester is broken and nobody fucking gets it. There’s no money to buy alcohol and no sanity to down pills.

“Dan? Dan, I’ll be back soon. Okay? I’ll find him and bring him back for you and—”

“Ask him if he loves me, Louis,” Sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy and the only way you can ever understand yourself is to know who you are when nothing remains of everybody else.

“Ask him if he loves me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be my favourite chapter that I’ve written for this so far.


	5. Inkling

**number five: inkling**

_Louis_ doesn’t return for a long time. Dan misses him while he’s gone. It’s early morning and the hotel room is silent, and he’s curled up in bedsheets with his husband’s jacket close to his face. The walls are empty, white and plain. The sky is yellow. His heart is sick.

It’s heavy as he rests there. Knees to his chest, nose in the jacket’s fabric. It smells like Phil, Dan knows, but Dan can’t remember what Phil smells like. Something minty— _white, white, white_ —and something safe. Sometimes smoke and sometimes alcohol, when his lips are wet and he’s close enough and he puffs out a breath. And Dan uses his words and uses his letters to write out the scents, like _vodka_ and _gin_ and _the nights we spent getting high on your bedroom floor._

But Dan is clean and he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t need syringes pushing up over bruised skin and he doesn’t need sprinkles of nothing over his tongue. Like Phil doesn’t need cigarettes and Phil doesn’t need alcohol and Phil doesn’t need _him._

Phil is a fucking liar.

Dan is a fucking liar, too.

And their mistakes ache like fingers under ribs, like nails scratching down milky skin and mouths moving against hipbones and _you look like you could start a fire with your feelings for me._ Phil under Dan’s stomach, Phil between Dan’s legs, Phil with dilated pupils and Phil out of his fucking head. They’re smoking joints on carpeted floors, in boxer-shorts and manic minds and they’ve got a bottle of whiskey to sterilise the wounds of minimal wages, of falling out of love and sticking your tongue out to taste snowflakes in the dead of late December. Of snorting and swallowing and chugging and smoking and trying to connect _M_ and _D_ and _M_ and _A_ as you stagger under Christmas lights. No fucking sales, no fucking cash. No fucking letters to use in connecting the pieces of your sanity back together like writing is sobriety and writing is recovery and writing is heaven. 

Writing is the difference between heaven and hell. It’s hard and it’s angry and Dan’s words read like they’re high on a stimulant, like they’ve been injected or they’ve missed their fix or they’ve been kicked into the gutter of motherfucking addiction. Like they’re overly-medicated, overdosed on prescription pills and choking on rings of white smoke. The syllables are broken people, convoluted and mutilated and lined up in a sequence, of sorts.

_MDMA._

Dan thinks about his mother. Dan thinks about his father. Dan thinks about his brother. He’s laying there on the mattress with the early Paris sun on his body and the fabric of the jacket around his face is damp.

He wants to go to Arles.

He wants to go to church.

He wants to go to Louis.

Louis, Louis, Louis. Orange like the sunset, orange like his aliens. Louis, Louis, Louis.

Everything is so fucking quiet.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint.

Dan’s mother used to make him eat his food and he started smoking drugs and popping pills on the floor with his teenage lover. Selfish fucking bastard. Sex on the tiles and empty streets at Christmas.

Dan gets up with Phil’s jacket in his arms and walks over to the door. Xanax. Bolted locks and shaking fingers. He’s crying and he’s terrified and he wants to rest his head in Phil’s lap and smoke from the same cigarette. He just wants to open the fucking door, if he could only open the fucking—

_“I saw her, Phil. I spoke to her.”_

Dan hears the bathroom door and then he hears the window and his psychiatrist tells him it’s not fucking real but his psychiatrist doesn’t know anything. His psychiatrist doesn’t know the first fucking thing about therapy and blood and pains in frontal lobes and suffocating parents and bul, bul—

—ympia.

The hardest part of being an artist is creating the fucking art. Because it isn’t art if they don’t believe it, and they don’t believe it if it isn’t art. And it’s sort-of funny, Dan thinks—as inventive demons start dancing around his pupils—that he can order agony and he can order tragedy like they’re fucking files on his desk. And sometimes you just have to go to one place to get to another, like his mother forcing food down his throat has allowed his mind to conjure sentences on eating disorders and how much he fucking hates her. Like ignoring the teachers at school has allowed his heart to cling to the creativity in foolishness, to build armies of locutions and synonyms to fight against failures and _maybe there’s a point in being disappointed._

Dan Howell skipped class to smoke outside of school. And Dan Howell made his textbooks replicas of Western Art. And Dan Howell scored the lowest in linguistic assessments because he didn’t understand the laws of language. And Dan Howell inked words across his wrists because they told him to write between the lines.

He was the kid who spelt _fuck you_ with a _v_ and not a _u_ and he was the kid who fucked around with matches, not because of the fire but because of what he could make of their boxes. He was the kid who made paper planes but never fucking threw them and he was the kid who rearranged shelves in toy stores if an elephant wasn’t sitting beside his friend.

And now he’s the man walking down a hotel hallway. He sees the sunset and he staggers over.

“Dan?” Louis is holding something and something else and Phil isn’t at his side. “Dan, buddy, where are you going?”

“Where’s Phil?” Dan tries to move past the man, stretching up on his socks to look over him. _Love you, love you, love you_. “Where’s Phil, Louis? Where’s Phil?”

“He’s not ready to come back yet, Dan,” Louis says gently. “He’s feeling tired and sad and he wants to be alone for a little bit. That’s okay, isn’t it? That’s okay for us to let people have what they want. I got us some breakfast—”

He’s got two drinks and a brown paper bag.

“No, Louis, did you see him?” Dan doesn’t mean to hurt anyone. He doesn’t mean to hurt his mother and he doesn’t mean to hurt Phil and he doesn’t mean to hurt Louis, as he claws to get around him. He likes Louis. He likes Louis so much and he wants to write about him. “Phil. Did you see Phil? Did you ask him if he loved me, Louis?”

“He does, buddy,” Louis says. He has gentle hands on Dan’s back to stable him. “He loves you more than you could ever know. To the moon and back, Dan. Do you hear me? Phil loves you to the moon and back.”

“He doesn’t believe in aliens, Louis,” Dan is crying again. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made happy. There’s a zero and a nine under a band of gold tight around his finger and he wants to vomit and he wants to scream. Aliens. Aliens. Aliens. “Did you ask him if he believed in aliens? He said no, didn’t he, Louis? He said no. He doesn’t believe in aliens and he doesn’t believe in Van Gogh and he doesn’t love me and he doesn’t want me and—Fuck him. I hate him, Louis. Did you tell him I hated him?”

“No, Dan. Come on,” Louis is trying to guide him back inside the room, but Dan doesn’t want to go.

He wants to go to Arles.

He wants to talk to Jesus.

He wants to see his mother.

“I don’t like Paris no more, Louis,” he whimpers, and he’s trembling and he’s yellow and he’s red and he’s grey. “I don’t like it here. I just want to go home, I just want to _write_.”

“You can write in here, you can write in the room,” Louis says with a patience that should be conducted when handling a patient. He’s gentle when he takes him through into the room and Dan swears the wallpaper was floral but now it’s orange, or some shit. Now it’s grey and now it’s green and now there are aliens dancing across the cosmos. He’s chugging out words at Louis that don’t make the slightest bit of sense, but he failed fucking language so what does it fucking matter that—

“I have a book in my bag, Louis, a book where I write and I make art and—Can you get it for me, Louis? Louis? Can you get it for me?”

“Of course I can, buddy,” Louis rests the paper bag and drinks down on the windowsill. And then he moves around a bit, searches for Dan’s heart, and he holds a black book in front of his face. “This is your book, yeah? Do you need a pen?”

“Yeah, Louis,” Dan is nodding when he takes the book. His hands are shaking. His hands are always fucking shaking. But Louis gives him a pen and then he just starts writing, and the words come like he’s been held underwater and his gift gives him oxygen. His handwriting is messy and smeared over the horrible pages. Some are torn and slipped back and some are folded right over. It’s an addiction and it’s a rehab centre and Dan’s psychiatrist tells him he doesn’t fucking _need_ to write like his mother told him it told her he needed help.

But she doesn’t get it.

Nobody fucking gets it.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made happy.

And nobody fucking gets that, either. So Dan thinks he has to spell it out, has to make it rhyme and make it pretty and his hand is running across the page like it’s an athlete in Olympia when he forms:

_Bulimia._

And he scratches out the word a thousand times after he’s written it because he’s terrified of everything.

He wants it to leave him alone.

He wants it to leave him alone.

He taps two fingers against the pages of his book and writes the sentence again. He has an inkling that what he’s inking isn’t right.

And then it’s Dan Howell coming home, Dan Howell injecting himself with his pathetic fucking passion like it’s something to be fucking proud of that he can cut words up and rearrange their pieces. That he can convince you they are vodka bottles. That he can make you believe sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy. He’s writing and writing and desperate and writing and he has a zero and a nine tattooed to his ring finger and there’s a man with food watching him as he works.

“You should try and eat something now, buddy,” he hears Louis say. Acute mania with generalised delirium. “You’ll feel better, I’m sure. I bought you some croissants. Have you ever had them before? Dan?”

Dan scratches the word _aliens_ so hard into his page that he can see it when he closes his eyes. The shadows are there and they’re dancing again, but Dan doesn’t fucking care.

Dan doesn’t fucking care.

He wants to—

Dan doesn’t fucking care. His words are there, too. He writes that he’s sorry to his mother and he’s sorry to his husband. He writes _fuck you_ and he writes _love you._ Writes yellow and green and grey. Writes orange and writes Louis, writes the colour of the city and the changes of the wind and the shade of the sunflowers and Phil Lester’s ocean eyes. Writes him kissing his mouth and feeding him a cigarette and climbing out of his bedroom window. Writes big flying machines and babies in blue cardigans and jackets over bodies. Writes milky skies and grinding teeth and “I want you” and “I need you” and—

“I’ve never been in love.”

“Dan, buddy, can you try this for me? Do you like hot chocolate?”

No dark blemishes.

Nutcase.

“No, Louis, I’m—Please, I’m busy,” Dan says, frantically. “Please just let me do this, Louis, I need to write about Arles and aliens and you and Phil and—”

“What did your mother say, Dan?” Louis interrupts with a calm voice. “She came, didn’t she? What did she say to you? Shall we talk about that?”

Dan starts shaking his head. “She didn’t—Phil said—”

“I know. I know what Phil said, but you saw her. Didn’t you? Why was she shouting? What was it about?”

“She—” Bul—ympic gold medalists and psychiatrists and mentalists. Rhyme, rhyme, rhyme. “It doesn’t matter, Louis. Don’t want to talk about this no more.”

“Have you ever tried croissants, buddy?” Louis is sitting at his side on the bed again. He’s lit himself another cigarette and the smoke is curdling in the back of Dan’s throat, but he won’t look up. He writes about it instead. Harsh and nasty. He glances up to his scribbled-out word and thinks about the time Phil sat outside the bathroom door and whispered poems of self-confidence and _I know it’s so ugly, baby, but it’s just a word you have to fight to get on your side and use it to your advantage and_ —

“Where’s Phil, Louis?” Dan’s book starts to slide off his lap. He’s dropped his pen. He doesn’t know what art it is and even if he did, he’d hate it. “I want Phil.”

“Please take this, Dan,” Louis is holding a croissant and a hot chocolate. It’s morning in France. “Take it and we can talk about aliens. And Van Gogh and colours and words.”

Dan can smell the food. He puts his hands to his face and he can smell the food. He buries his nose in Phil’s coat and he can smell the food and he knows he’s a fucking nutcase, knows his stomach is shrinking and Phil is drinking because he can’t just—

“Eat,” Louis whispers. He’s there with his hand on Dan’s sharp back. “Phil loves you, Dan. He loves you. Eat.”

Dan is crying. “He doesn’t love me. You didn’t ask him. You didn’t ask him and he doesn’t believe in aliens or the fucking moon, Louis, he doesn’t believe in _me_ —”

“Eat this for me and we can go look for him. I’ll take you out into Paris and show you some things.”

“Phil,” Dan croaks his name into the sleeves of his pyjamas. _Fuck you, fuck you, love you._ They got high on his bedroom floor and fucked in the kitchen and fought in the living-room and all the way down the hall. They strung their memories up like fucking polaroids and flicked their lighters, watched them burn and crumble to nothing and they are no little or no more than a fucking disaster. A zero and a nine. An affair under a milky sky. An alcoholic and a lunatic. A quatrain about Manchester station, joined hands in queues that are trained to hold on. Stains over skin, _you are the blue in my veins and the “my” in migraines._ In too fucking deep and out too fucking fast, trying to detach yourself without knowing you have to break the fucking strings. And Dan doesn’t know how it happens—or he does but he can’t describe it—but he starts eating his food.

Drinking his drink.

He’s got meds in his system and Xs on his wrists. Croissants and hot chocolates and, “He slept with somebody else, Louis, he had sex with somebody else.”

“I know, Dan, and he’s having a little child. You said, I remember. Do you like children?” Louis is still sitting there with his free hand on Dan’s back.

“I saw a baby on the big flying machine,” Dan says. He hiccups because he’s been crying and now he’s eating and it’s much too fast. “He was small and gorgeous and I wanted to write about him.”

“What colour do you think his aliens are?”

“Blue. I think they’re blue, Louis. But yours are orange and mine are—Mine are—Van Gogh’s are yellow.”

“I know,” Louis smiles. “Like his sunflowers. And like the sun before it sets.”

Dan has his hands around his hot chocolate and a half-eaten croissant in his lap. He’s sitting cross-legged in his space pyjamas, Phil’s jacket over his shoulders. He says, “He used to yellow paint,” and then, “Because it made him happy. Do you think sad things are pretty, Louis?”

“Sometimes, buddy. Sometimes it takes somebody to show you they are.”

“Yeah,” Dan rushes through the word to put his lips back to his food. _Bul, bul—Yellow, yellow, yellow._ Delicate yellow. Happy. “Art is everything.”

“Art?” Louis repeats.

“Art. Like writings and paintings and songs and hymns and people, Louis. Feelings, Louis. You believe in aliens, don’t you?”

They say insanity is repetition when the point’s already been made.

Louis nods because he’s lovely. “I believe in aliens. I believe in the moon, too. And the stars and the sky.”

“But not the sun,” Dan starts shaking his head. “No, no, not the sun. Just the sun’s shine.”

“The sun’s shine,” Louis nods again. He’s calm and collected and smoking a cigarette. “Just the sun’s shine. Beautiful. Have you finished? Do you want my drink?”

Dan wipes his sleeve across his mouth and feels his stomach churning like it’s moving its gears, all stiff from lack of use. He shakes his head and puts his fingers—hot from his chocolate—to his tummy. He feels sick but he says, “Louis? Louis, can we go and find Phil now?”

And Louis is smiling this strange sort-of smile, helping Dan to his feet and zipping Phil’s jacket up over him. “You can shower before we leave, if you want. It might refresh you and—”

“No, Louis,” Dan says. He clenches his fists and unclenches them again. The sky is not yellow. “I want Phil, I want Phil. I want Phil, Louis, you told me to _eat_ and I have and I want him and—”

“You have. You’ve eaten, buddy,” Louis is still the sunset with his cigarette and his smile. He’s gentle in taking Dan out of the room, locking the door and leading him out. Dan’s feet feel strange on the stairs. Dan’s feet feel strange on the concrete pavers.

He’s wearing his shoes.

Paris is busy.

Phil is drinking.

He’s eaten and he feels funny. Dizzy and manic. His stomach is doing cartwheels like it did that time Phil ran his lips over his collarbone and down both his sides.

_Fuck you, fuck you, love you._

The sun is out.

It takes too long to find Phil. Dan’s just following Louis, the sunset, clicking his fingers and skipping cracks in the pavement. Everybody is looking at him and he keeps wiping his hand over his mouth. He can taste the sugary drink in his throat. He’s wearing space pyjamas and Phil’s jacket and he tugs on the hood, pulls it over his head and carries on clicking.

One, two, three.

Phil doesn’t believe in aliens.

Phil is drinking.

Phil is sitting on the roadside in the middle of street. He’s on the floor when they find him, and Dan moves to sit down tight at his side.

“Hi, Phil,” Dan whispers. His leg moves against his husband’s as he forces himself closer.

“Go away,” Phil mutters. He’s resting his forehead against a bottle of gin. Addiction. His voice is hazy with growing intoxication. “Take him away, Louis.”

“He won’t do anything without you,” Louis says. “He ate his breakfast because I told him we could look for you, and I would show him around Paris.”

“I ate croissants, Phil,” Dan has his thin hands in his lap as he sits there on the roadside. “And hot chocolate.”

Phil runs his finger over his bottle’s label. “Have you puked it up yet?”

Bul, bul—

—ympia.

“Phil,” There is strength behind the harshness in Louis’ voice.

“What?” Phil glances up. The oceans in his eyes are moving slowly, waves washing over the sand. He’s moved himself away from Dan. “He’s got a fucking screw loose, Louis, he’s psychotic. He makes himself sick.”

“Because he’s not well,” Louis is hard and defensive. The sun is setting behind a scape of darkness. “Are you, Dan? You’re not well, are you?”

“I’m well,” Dan says. He shuffles back to Phil and the man grunts, turning away from him.

“Go _away_ , Dan. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to look at you. You need to go,” he slurs. It’s the time they screamed and punched and cried and _you are the reason I’m a fucking addict_. Dan drives Phil to liquor like Phil drives Dan to words, and their hearts are bruised and broken and scarred and nobody fucking gets it.

“But I want you, Phil, I want to be with you,” Dan is trembling again. The strangers are looking at him and he wants Phil to protect him. Love him and hold him and kiss him. He doesn’t believe in aliens. “I won’t even talk, Phil, I won’t even be sick. I promise, I—”

“Yes, you will. Go away.”

“Please,” Dan begs, tinged with emotion. He’s not well but nobody fucking gets it. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“Don’t want you anymore, Dan,” Phil drones, working the words from his alcohol intake. It’s sloshing through his blood. “Don’t love you anymore. Fuck off.”

And Dan doesn’t know how he fucking does it, but he starts crying again. Thinks of white flakes and getting high and sleeping in single beds. Thinks of book sales and light wages and nutcase, nutcase, nutcase. Yellow aliens. Orange aliens. Green aliens. Phil Lester doesn’t believe in the moon and he can’t remember how to love his husband to scare his pain away.

“Dan? Dan!”

Dan is walking and he doesn’t fucking care. There are Xs on his wrists and he wants to inject the skin with his addiction. With his recovery. He wants to vomit and his throat is aching for his fingers. 

“Fucking hell, Dan, _stop_ ,” Phil is there suddenly, an arm around Dan’s waist to pull him back. Dan stumbles over his heels as Phil shifts him with a bottle of liquor and a high alcohol level.

They’re standing in the middle of the fucking road.

The cars have stopped for Dan’s sudden presence and he swears he feels the tarmac under his feet.

A man has gotten out of his car.

“What the fuck’s happening, mate?” English. Harsh. Nasty. He probably doesn’t believe in aliens.

“I’m sorry, sir, he’s—” Louis is helping to move Dan out of the road. “He’s not sane.”

“Where’s his fucking straitjacket? Why isn’t he locked up? You need to put him on a goddamn leash,” The man spits.

“I’ll wrap the leash around your fucking throat if you don’t fuck off,” Phil still has his arm around Dan’s small body. _Love you, love you, love you._

“Do you believe in aliens?” Dan is mumbling under his breath. “Yellow aliens and red aliens. What about grey aliens? Are your aliens grey, Phil?”

The man shouts something with aggression and gets back into his car. They’ve moved onto the sidewalk.

“You could’ve gotten yourself _killed_ ,” Phil still has his hand wrapped around the neck of a bottle and an arm around Dan. They’re still fucking married.

“I’m sorry, Phil, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Dan shifts with trembles and tears and buries his face into Phil’s shoulder. He feels Phil’s body stiffen as he tightens his hands around his shirt, and he loves him and he hates him and— “I’m so sorry, Phil. I saw my mom, she came back for me. She hates me, she screamed at me, she—”

“Get off me, Dan,” Phil slurs, but it’s smoother. Softer. He tries to move him back, but he doesn’t push hard enough. Dan would crumble to nothing on the little Paris street if Phil shoved him.

“She came, Phil. Do you believe me? Louis believes me,” Dan nudges his nose over Phil’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Phil. I’m sorry. I took my meds and I ate my breakfast. Did Louis ask you if you loved me? He said you said you did. To the moon, Phil, and all the way back and—”

“I don’t,” Phil tries to move away. “Get off, Dan. Don’t touch me, don’t want me. Want to fucking drink, leave me alone.”

“Let’s go and look at some things, Dan,” Louis reaches to take Dan’s arm, but Dan thrashes him off and tries to snake his arms around Phil’s neck and—

“Dan, please, no,” Phil pushes his hand on Dan’s chest. He’s holding a bottle of gin. They got high on the bedroom floor. “Fuck off, just fuck off. I don’t _love_ you anymore.”

“Why are you drinking that, Phil?” Dan’s hands move for the bottle. “You can’t drink that, you’re not supposed to—”

Recovery. Recovery. Dan was supposed to Phil’s rehab centre and Phil was supposed to be Dan’s psychiatric ward. But the places have fucking shut down, doors locked and barred and Dan’s fighting to make it better but he’s only making it worse. They say he never gets it, say he never understands anything, and maybe that’s true but he never fucking left Phil on his own and he never fucking will.

“Don’t come near that,” Phil manages to get away. “I’m not yours and I don’t love you and I fucked somebody else. I’m having a child with somebody else and I don’t want you anymore. I don’t need you anymore. I never want to see you again.”

“I _hate_ you,” Dan cries. Louis is trying to touch him but he doesn’t want the sunset. He doesn’t want aliens and Van Gogh and sunflowers. He just wants Phil to kiss him and whisper words to him and run his fingers through his hair but— “I hate you, Phil, you make me hurt so much. You’re supposed to love me, you’re supposed to—Please, Phil, just let me touch you.”

“ _No_ ,” Phil chokes. He swigs from the bottle and the gin runs down the corner of his mouth, and he bunches his sleeve up to catch it. He had an affair and a woman is carrying his child and Dan can’t remember her name. “Leave me alone, Dan, I want you to leave me alone. Don’t follow me, just fuck off—”

“Phil,” Dan is following him down the street. He’s psychotic and Socratic and Van Gogh was an addict and the world doesn’t cry because it wants it, it cries because it had it. Dan catches Phil, and wraps his arms around him. “I-I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt you—I didn’t mean to make you drink and make you sleep with—I’m sorry—”

“Come on, Dan, let him go,” Louis gently takes Dan’s hands from Phil. “I’ll show you some things, we can go wherever—”

“No, Louis,” Dan sobs, and the man hooks an arm around his shoulders. “He doesn’t love me anymore, Louis—He hates me and it’s my fault and I want to be s-sick but I don’t want to hurt anyone—I don’t mean to hurt anyone like I’m hurting—”

“Shh, now,” Louis whispers. He’s the sunset again. Soft and kind and gentle. He rubs circles over Dan’s back and moves the hair from his face. His aliens are orange. “You’re gonna be okay, buddy. I’ll make sure you’re okay. Do you want to go back to your room? Do you—”

“T-They come for me when I’m on my own, Louis,” The words come choked and strangled. Dan connects _break_ and _down_ as he breaks down words. “I need Phil to love me, t-to make them go away—”

“How about I show you my apartment?” Louis’ eyes are on fire. Orange and orange and orange. He’s lovely. “I have paintings and sketches and art. Come on, buddy. We can talk there and you can calm down.”

And Dan mutters something back about yellow and aliens and dirty syringes and clinging to metal crucifixes. He follows Louis. Outskirts of Paris. He wishes he was in Arles and inking down words on his skin. Pen between his fingers like a mockery of a rolled cigarette, igniting fire to the sheets of paper. Xanax. A couple kicks and skin like acrylics and elastic organs like they’ve been slashed right down the middle with a steak knife. Blood leaking out around bony fingers. Zero, nine, joints to pass the time and clinics to construct of satire and parody. Dan Howell is a replica of Western Art. He is a jargon and a hyperbole, hyperrealistic and metabolic and kenotic. A neurotic fucking mess. He is the purple of irises and two rats and two hands.

He is the loneliness of seventeen minutes past three and taking big flying machines up to the space in his head.

“Louis?”

It isn’t art if they don’t believe it, and they don’t believe it if it isn’t art.

“Yeah?”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

There is creativity in foolishness.

There is creativity in delusion.

“Yeah, buddy. I’m your friend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was intense. Before you feel any animosity towards Phil’s actions though, it’s important for you to know that there are problems with him, too. He has issues, and that’s sort-of covered up by Dan’s intense, overplayed thoughts. But his emotions and problems will start to become more prevalent as it moves forward.
> 
> Addiction is something that’s starting to come up a lot in various areas of the story and both Dan and Phil have individual addictions that have influenced their marriage. The breakdown of it cannot be blamed on either of them—rather, both. Also, I do hope you’re enjoying this story. It’s something I love to write and work with.


	6. Tickling

**number six: tickling**

_There_ are paintings all over Louis’ walls and sketches all over his floor. He used to be an art student and it makes Dan feel less alone.

His apartment is on the corner of a street in the middle of Paris and it’s quite large and it’s quite beautiful and everything is white. Clean, sterilised. The fucking same. Dan’s mind compliments it but it doesn’t mean anything.

He wants to be sick.

“These are my paintings, buddy, all over my walls,” Louis is standing in the centre of his room when he lifts his hands and Dan yearns to write about the way he looks amongst the swirls of colour. “And these are my sketches on the floor. Do you want to see?”

Dan sits himself down on crossed legs. He’s careful when he takes a sheet of paper to study the fine outlines of pencil. “It’s beautiful, Louis, they’re beautiful,” he sniffs, and rubs his nose on the front of his pyjama shirt. “Do you draw aliens, Louis?”

“No,” Louis says. He’s sitting down, too. “But I could. If you wanted, I could draw you some aliens.”

“Your aliens. Draw me your aliens, Louis. Orange like the sunset. But not green and not with antennas, not like TV sets. They’re somebody else’s aliens,” Dan peers around the apartment. His head hurts. “What’s your favourite painting, Louis? Van Gogh. Is it Van Gogh?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Louis nods. “Van Gogh. Maybe that one about the peasants. The Potato Eaters. I like that one the most.”

“The Potato Eaters, yeah,” Dan sniffs again. He wishes he’d brought his bag with him, with his paintings and his books. Eat, eat, eat. “It’s dark, that, Louis. It’s dark shades and tones. No yellow. It’s in Amsterdam.”

Amsterdam.

“In the museum?” Louis remarks. “That’s nice. I’d like to go someday. Have you ever—”

“I took my meds, Louis,” Dan’s heart aches suddenly, stomach groans. He starts playing with the buttons on his pyjamas and the zipper on Phil’s jacket and _I don’t love you anymore_. “Did you know? I took them. Mom used to say they made me bad. She said I just needed to get over it.”

“Do you want to talk about your mother, Dan?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Dan shakes his head and wipes his hand over his nose. “She never liked Van Gogh, Louis. She thought I was stupid for talking about him.”

“Why did she think that?” Louis’ eyebrows are creased. Calm. Patient.

“Because she hates me. My mom hates me, Lou, and she doesn’t believe me.”

“Believe, what? What is there to believe?”

“I’m hurting,” Dan’s mouth starts quivering and he’s staring at a sketch of the ocean on his friend’s floor. It’s steady, but it’s not. It’s blue, but it’s not. Grey and green and yellow. “I’m hurting so much, Louis, and I’m trying to make it go away but I don’t think I have enough words to.”

“And why are you hurting?” Louis whispers with kind eyes. Yellow paint because it made him happy. Orange aliens because it made him happy. Sex after cigarettes because it made him fucking happy. “Did something happen with your mother? With Phil or in your head?”

“My head,” Dan echoes. “My head, head, head. Fucking stupid fucking place. There’s so much space in space and so much time to waste.”

Rhyme, rhyme, rhyme.

“Do you want a drink, Dan?”

“People don’t care, Louis,” Dan says. He   
runs his finger over the blue vein in his arm and wonders who made it blue. “People don’t care. My mom made me eat my food and she left and she doesn’t care. My God made me feel guilty and he’s not here and he doesn’t care. Did you know, Louis? I can write.”

“I know, Dan. Do you—”

“Phil writes, too. He’s really good, too. Have you seen his book?” Empty shelves in bookstores to juxtapose clustered heads, clustered notes and fucking ghosts channeling from a lack of space. There will never be enough paper in the world for Dan to accurately depict his feelings and there will never be enough words in the world for him to regardless.

“I’ve seen, Dan. Read it a couple times. Have you?”

“I’ve read it, Louis,” Dan is nodding. “I’ve read it a thousand times. First draft, second draft, third. Phil used to whisper it under his breath to send me to sleep.”

And Dan thinks maybe it’s the greatest he’s felt in a while as he recalls Phil’s tired voice tickling at his ear, recalls him facing the ceiling and holding his sheets constructed of a messy storyline. Recalls _what if it’s not good enough, Dan?_ and _do you think this sounds okay?_ and _read it to me, again, Phil, read it gently._ Gentle like the touches of Van Gogh’s paintbrush and his definition of the colour yellow. Paris and Arles and a view from a window attached to a psychotic mind to produce a starry night.

The night that never fucking sold until _oh, Van Gogh, he’s dead_ and _let’s pay a bit of respect_ and people don’t fucking care about anything. People don’t care about the shit that matters because the shit that matters only matters when it’s gone.

“Are you my friend, Louis?”

“Yeah, Dan. Do you want a drink?”

Drink. 

Bottles of alcohol lined up in the kitchen. Pale fingers around caps, corks and openers on countertops. _Fuck you, fuck you, love you._

“Louis?”

Louis breathes softly through his nose and brings a hand through his hair. “Yeah, buddy?”

“Things are not as they should be, are they? Things aren’t good, Lou. Things are bad and I ate my breakfast and Phil doesn’t love me or think the sky is pretty. It isn’t yellow anymore.”

“What colour is it now, then?”

“It’s—” Dan leans up and looks out of the window. “Red. It’s red, Lou. Can you see?”

Louis doesn’t turn to look out of the glass, but he smiles. “I can, buddy. Do you not like the colour red?”

“No,” Dan says. “Red for blood and red for pain and red for my mother’s nails and red for—red for—Paris. I hate it, Lou.”

Dan thinks about the colour red and he thinks about it running out of his nose on a Tuesday lunchtime in the middle of a school day. He thinks about wiping it on the front of his shirt and he thinks about it spilling through the sink. He thinks about washing it from over his arms and on his sleeves and he thinks about his mother and he thinks about his father. Red smeared over their hands, holding it in their palms. Jesus fucking Christ on his fucking cross, like his mother with his nails and his parents with his blood. Because red is for the fourteenth of the second month and red is for falling in love and red is for paintbrushes in a flowerpot. Still life. Red is for cherry knots and red is for chocolate boxes and red is for fucking somebody else. It’s locked bathroom doors and hour-long showers and old school jumpers and the colour of the Paris sky. It sounds like sitting on the stairs and listening to the screaming and listening to the crying, trying not to breathe when there’s a bump and a bang and a silence expands. It sounds like French soldiers in the First World War. It sounds like the school fire alarm. Bullets and weapons and trainers against polished floors and sex in a cheap hotel room. It’s crucifixion and the _end call_ button on the phone to your mother and _I hate it, I hate it, I want it to leave me alone._

But red is persistence and red is Mars and red is thin atmospheres and volcanic eruptions. It’s blotches of embarrassment and crayons with broken ends and drawings strung on refrigerator doors. Emergency rooms. Paper cuts. Phil and wine and _you said you wouldn’t drink anymore._ And strawberry kisses and jam on toast and coughing up blood from the back of your throat. Thinking too hard about what something means because what something means is never what it does, but Dan thinks red is lipsticks stains on white teeth and the gashes on his wrists and they can’t fucking tell him that’s not what it is.

“Don’t you like it here, Dan?” Louis asks a couple times and Dan can’t remember what the fuck he even said.

He can’t remember what’s wrong with him. He can’t remember if he took his meds. He can’t remember if he ate his breakfast and if he’s puked it up yet and he can’t remember where his husband is.

“Phil,” he mutters the name and it tastes red. There are sketches all around his feet. “I want to go to Phil now, Louis.”

“Let’s just give him some time, shall we?” Louis stills for a moment and looks over to his wall. He points to a painting and it’s a bit like _ignore everything but the art, art, art_. “Do you know what that is, Dan?”

Prisoners. Exercising. The monotonous and monochrome asylum.

“It’s Van Gogh, Louis.”

“It is. Which one?”

“ _Prisoners Exercising_ ,” The words roll from Dan’s tongue. “After Doré. Eighteen ninety.”

“Yeah, buddy,” Louis smiles. There’s surprise and there’s fascination and he’s lighting another cigarette. “That’s right, well done. Do you—”

“Doré was an illustrator. Did you know? And Van Gogh painted that because he was a prisoner,” Dan clambers to his feet and Louis startles, before seemingly settling upon realising the man is just attending the painting.

Dan drags his fingers over the surface and mumbles, “Eighteen ninety. He just wanted to be fucking happy, Lou. He was a prisoner and so am I and so are you. So is Phil.”

“A prisoner?” Louis echoes. He’s still sitting on the floor smoking. “Van Gogh was a prisoner, Dan?”

“Yeah, Louis. Don’t you see him?” Dan touches the men on the canvas.

“See him?”

“He’s here,” The tip of Dan’s finger hovers over a man’s face. And Louis gets up and he walks over to him, stops behind him with his cigarette and his patience and waits. Stares as Dan shifts the focus to another man, and then another and another.

“I don’t get it,” Louis whispers. It’s hoarse from the smoke and quiet from the embarrassment and there’s no red on the painting but Dan thinks about it. He thinks about whether Van Gogh thought about it, too. Whether all those men did, too.

He says, “It’s okay, Louis,” and turns to smile at the man. And it feels strange and it feels wrong but Dan smiles because he’s thinking about taking his school uniform off and changing into his space pyjamas. He’s thinking about studying words in a bookstore’s corner and liking the way a quatrain tickles at his careful attention. Louis is the sunset and Louis is a friend and Louis doesn’t get it, but Dan’s mind doesn’t mind. “Van Gogh is all of these people, Louis. Don’t you see him? He’s there, I promise. And I am, too.”

“You’re a prisoner?”

“Yeah, Lou. And Phil is. Can you see him? We’re tedium and we’re sadness. We’re confined and confused and our limbs are stiff from lack of use and—We want to escape, Lou, I want to escape. But exercising isn’t escaping and people don’t fucking get it and—”

“Hey, hey,” Louis puts a soft hand to Dan’s back. “What do you want to escape from? What are you a prisoner to?”

“You know, Louis,” Dan says. His voice is shaking and he jams his fingers into the sides of his head. “I write words to exercise when my mind’s stiff but I can’t escape my pain. Van Gogh gets it, Louis. Phil gets it too, even if he doesn’t say it. Phil gets everything.”

“He does?” Louis’ voice is gentle.

“Yeah,” Dan nods. “He used to tell me it all. Doré illustrated the Bible and parts of Van Gogh and God illustrated the rest. And this painting means that we all want to get out of something but we’re not doing the right shit to. We do what helps us but not what saves us. Do you get it, Louis? I’m sorry, I don’t understand it anymore. Phil doesn’t talk to me anymore. Nobody talks to me anymore.”

And Louis starts saying something but Dan is still staring at the prisoners. They’re lined and they’re moving in a circle, and the walls are built high to keep them in. And it makes no fucking sense, but Dan doesn’t make any fucking sense. He wishes he could write a paragraph on what the painting means like his string of sleepless nights studying it should allow him to. But he can’t conjure anything borderline creative in Louis’ stupid fucking white apartment. He hates it and he wants Phil. He hates it and he wants to go home.

“Dan? Dan?”

“I don’t like it here, Louis,” Dan is saying. Over and over and over. “I can’t think right, Louis. I want to go, I want to leave. I want—Can I have this?”

He’s got his fingers wrapped around Louis’ lighter and he’s going to flick at the flame until it crackles and burns and it’s dancing in the black of his eyes. Until the words he says are beautiful and not repetitive and everybody’s fucking listening because he has so much to say. He’s going to flick at the flame with a cigarette in his mouth and his lungs will cough out the taste of smoke, like _long time_ and _no see_ and it’s been a long time since the sea was red in Phil Lester’s eyes. Dan is going to flick at the flame until it tells him what colour is aliens are, and until his mind can form sentences that make sense without others. And until things are as they should be and the world knows Jesus didn’t die for their souls, he died for his own. Until people stop trying to fucking convince him what insanity is and what colour the sky is and what colour his love is. And where he has to go and the people he has to talk to and the things he has to believe because _fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do._

Dan is going to flick at the flame until his husband believes in aliens and he can think of something to say before he sticks his fingers down his throat. And he can remember how to make him happy. And he can remember how to make his earth spin at the right pace. And he can remember how to make him whimper and he can remember where his smile begins and he can remember where he likes to be touched.

Dan’s flame will speak of the moments his mother raised her hand to the question of child abuse. It will speak of his loneliness and his obsession with Van Gogh. It will speak of the days he used cocaine to exercise the time and his infatuation with Phil Lester’s words sloshed like vodka in an empty stomach.

“Please, just pass it to me,” Louis keeps talking. He’s lovely, but Dan doesn’t care. He wants to go home. “Please, Dan. Pass it to me, buddy, and I’ll take you to Phil.”

“No, Louis, I want—” Dan is fumbling with the lighter and it’s against his chest. _I will set my fucking heart on fire for you, I just want you to—_ “I want a cigarette, Louis. I want to smoke again. Phil drinks again and I smoke again and—”

“Why don’t you smoke anymore?” Louis has is hand on Dan’s shoulder. “I don’t think you should, buddy, not if you stopped and—”

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“Stop it, Louis,” Dan pushes him away. “I don’t want you here anymore. I want to go to Phil, Phil is—He’s supposed to be here and not you. This isn’t about you. This is about us.”

“I’m trying to help you, give me the lighter,” Louis reaches and snatches it from Dan’s grip, and Dan puts his hands to his face. His fingers push in over his eyelids and he thinks about red and he thinks about pain and he thinks about the pointlessness of everything he’s said. Thinks _who the fuck cares about a postimpressionist’s favourite colour?_ and _who the fuck cares about your father and your mother?_ and—

Dan just wants to go home.

Dan doesn’t care about word counts and being a fucking poet. He doesn’t care about alcoholics and drug addictions and space pyjamas. He doesn’t care for the likelihood of anything he’s said before this sentence being true.

And he thinks he might stop writing soon.

Because fuck it and fuck sadness. Fuck it and fuck pain. As if anybody’s even fucking listening to the kid who says he’ll start a fire but gives up the lighter before he gets to the end of his sentence.

Louis is lovely and Louis is kind and Dan is a fucking mess of emotions, but he takes him to the hotel room. Because he thinks it’s home or some shit. He thinks it’s where Dan wants to be. But, really, Dan just fucking wishes he’d die. He just wishes he knew how to write something with a plot, so it’d fucking sell and he could afford a loaf of bread and all the liquor his husband craves. He wishes he knew things everybody else does and he wishes he’d been good at Math. He wishes he’d never decided to read a book and he wishes he hadn’t build his life on the probability of becoming a fucking author because like _fuck_ will it ever happen. Like _fuck_ is he good enough.

He wishes Van Gogh had never started painting.

He wishes Phil Lester had forgot to meet him at the station.

He wishes somebody had told Jesus Christ that we’re not fucking worth it.

The Paris hotel room is not Dan Howell’s home. Phil Lester is curled up like a broken fucking soul in the centre of a single bed and it will never be his home. Dan thinks _why don’t you believe in aliens?_ and _what colour paint did Van Gogh eat?_ He thinks _when did you stop loving me?_ and _do you blame me for the mess?_ and there’s a weight in his stomach as he wanders across the room.

“Dan,” Louis shuts the door carefully. “Don’t wake him, buddy, come on. If he sleeps well, he might want to talk to you and—”

“He doesn’t love me anymore, Louis. Did you know?” Dan takes the jacket off his shoulders and sits on his bed. He starts counting his fingers and the difference between the number when Phil’s were there, too, and he realises it’s a bit like trying to find his way home. But he can’t construct cars of words anymore because he won’t let himself. He fucking hates them. They’re ugly and they’re hard. They’re strong and they’re nasty and they’re cold like limbs tumbling out bedsheets.

He wants to load bullets and fire them at similes, obliterate metaphors into shards of _nothing_ because it’s ironic that’s all he can come up with.

“He does love you, Dan,” Louis tells him. “You guys are just struggling right now. But you’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. He needs some space right now and—”

“He relapsed, Louis,” Dan traces his finger over the lines indented in his palm. Phil’s bottle is on the floor. “He hates me and he’s drinking again and it’s my fault.”

“No, Dan. It isn’t your fault. You can’t help the way you think and feel.”

Dan shakes his head and looks down at the floor. His book is still there with his pen and he continues shaking his head at his writing— _fuck you, fuck you, love you_ —because it makes him feel sick.

“Please go now, Louis,” Dan whispers. It’s strained and it hurts. He retrieves Phil’s jacket again and lays his head down on his pillow, shifting to hold the material close to his chest. Something to cling to.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?” Louis asks.

“No,” Dan feels like crying. “Please, Louis. I want to sleep now. They won’t come for me, they won’t—Phil’s here, he’ll protect me.”

He doesn’t want to look at the man standing in the doorway because what he really means is _Phil doesn’t protect me anymore but his jacket will because it smells like him._

And it’s enough, maybe.

It always was, maybe.

So Louis leaves, and Dan stays. A sequence, of sorts. Before he departs, he scribbles something down on a little piece of paper and leaves it on the windowsill. It doesn’t matter what it says. It doesn’t matter what it means.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

: :

It’s the sound of red that wakes Dan. Like _fuck_ does he know how he even got to sleep and like _fuck_ does he know what time it is. He has his hands wrapped tight around Phil’s jacket and the man is back on the dresser.

His husband isn’t in his bed. The room is dark. The air is silent. Somebody starts running down the hall. Somebody messes with the zipper on Dan’s bag. Somebody flushes the toilet.

And then the bathroom door opens, and it’s Phil. He’s standing with his hand in his hair and the other holding a tissue to the corner of his mouth. There’s a sort-of redness to him that Dan hasn’t been able to describe for a while. He’s all wine and thin atmospheres and fucking somebody else and _you said you wouldn’t drink anymore_. And lipstick stains on white teeth, strawberry kisses and emergency rooms. Phil is red, but there’s purple under his eyes. Irises.

The man on the dresser watches him when he walks and Dan’s tired and frail heart fucking _dares_ him to touch his husband.

“Go back to sleep,” Phil mutters, as he sits down the bed. There’s a haziness in his voice, vodka tickling at all the edges. Dan doesn’t know what it is and, even if he did, he’d hate it.

Even if he did, he probably wouldn’t describe it. Because his words are fucking demons, worked from disarray and fear and there’s nothing but still life in those moments in the hotel room.

“Dan,” Phil says his name. He’s lighting a cigarette and sitting in boxer-shorts on the end of his bed. “I said, go back to sleep. Lie down. And give me my jacket back.”

“No, please,” Dan suddenly conjures. It’s small and meek. Fucking pathetic. “Let me have it, Phil—Please. I’m cold.”

Phil ignores him and rests his head against his hand. Dan is sitting there on the mattress in space pyjamas, watching him as he blows rings of smoke into the nothingness.

He wishes they could write a painting.

“Can I have one, Phil?”

Phil looks up. The fucking alcoholic. The fucking addict. The fucking mess. “What?”

“Can I have one?” Dan shifts his hands on the jacket to bring the collar to his face. “A cigarette.”

“No,” Phil snaps. “Fuck, no.”

“Please, Phil,” Dan shuffles forward and puts his feet on the floor. He took his shoes off, maybe. “Just one, I only want one. Light one for me, please—”

“ _No_ , Dan. You’re not having a cigarette. Go back to sleep or take a shower or something. Where did Louis go?”

Dan gets up and walks over to the windowsill. Yellow and red and green. Grey and purple and the Paris sky is monotonous and monochromatic. He hasn’t been sick yet. His meds are in his stomach and they’re soaked in with his breakfast.

_I don’t love you anymore._

Dan takes the note and squints his eyes at Louis’ handwriting.

_Wrote my number on back. Return soon. We need to talk about Dan._

“What’s that?” Phil demands. Dan scrunches the note in a fist and drops it down the side of the bed. _Fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do._

He doesn’t know what he wants and he doesn’t know if he’s making sense. He’s becoming too self-aware to be the poet he’s named himself. His sentences are starting to sound too much like they did when he tried to score high grades in English.

“I don’t think Louis likes me anymore, Phil,” Dan sniffs because he’s fucking crying again and starts pacing next to the window. Over and over and the man on the dresser is still watching.

“What do you mean, he doesn’t like you? What the hell did you do?”

“Nothing, Phil, I didn’t do anything. Don’t be mad,” he whimpers. “Please, can I have a cigarette?”

“Fucking _Jesus_ ,” Phil rubs the back of his nose. “I told you, no. You’re nothing but a fucking nuisance, just go to sleep and shut up.”

And Dan doesn’t like to cry, but he cries a little more. He’s smeared in red and he’s still wearing his ring and Louis never asked him why. Louis is the sunset. Louis is lovely. Dan wishes he was in love with him, and not the man on the end of the bed. Not the alcoholic. Not the addict. Not the mess.

Not Phil.

He wishes they could write a painting.

“You don’t love me anymore,” Dan cries like the shadows are slashing his heart and Phil’s moving out to go and live with his child. Responsibility. Recovery. Relapse and resting in a bed that isn’t yours.

“Get out of there,” Phil’s voice is cooler, and Dan thinks maybe he’s picked his bottle back up. “Dan, get the fuck out of there. That isn’t your bed, I don’t want you to—Get _out_.”

“Just give me a cigarette, Phil,” Dan fists the clean sheets and soaks them with his filthy conscience. “Give me one and I’ll get out and—”

“Fucking hell, I hate you,” Phil shoves Dan’s thin legs over and sits down next to him, turning to hold his breath and mutter, “Just—Fuck, don’t lose your shit. One drag. _One_ , Dan, I mean it.”

And Dan nods his head with tears all over his face. Red for mistakes and red for relapses. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip and tastes the salt in the water, as Phil clenches his jaw and puts the cigarette in his mouth.

It’s so much of nothing and so much of something that Dan’s head can’t fucking take it. But he feels eighteen again, feels like he’s got Phil’s kiss on his throat and Phil’s hands up his shirt and he’s spluttering on the taste of rebellion and smoke. He closes his eyes and he can’t hear his mother and he can’t see his shadows and he can’t remember what bul—ympia would sound like if he wasn’t so frightened. The cigarette feels so fucking good when he inhales that he shuffles forward on the bed, brings his hand to Phil’s holding it there and—

“No,” Phil mumbles. Something’s changed, but the man is still watching when the cigarette is gone. “No more, Dan.”

“Please,” Dan croaks and runs his tongue over his mouth again. The Xs on his wrists are too pale against his skin and he’s not a replica of Western Art, he’s not a lunatic in love with an alcoholic. He’s desperate and he’s red. He’s forgotten his inkling. “Please, Phil, I—”

“You can’t,” Phil’s tone has softened like Van Gogh has painted it yellow. “Dan, you can’t. You know you can’t. Not anymore.”

“But you’re drinking again,” Dan whimpers and moves forward to clench his fingers over the front of Phil’s shirt. It’s ugly and it’s wrong and it’s _fuck you, I don’t love you._

But, God, Dan does. Dan loves him like he’s holding a drug he’s addicted to.

“Just sleep, you need to sleep,” Phil says, and his teeth are clenched tight when he uses the back of his pale hand to shift the hair from Dan’s face. “If I let you have one more, will you _sleep_?”

“Yeah, Phil, yeah,” Dan drags his nose over his pyjama sleeve. “Promise, Phil.”

And it feels like even if the answer had been _no_ , Phil would let him have it. Because he’s always been in love with the way Dan looks when he’s in love.

The cigarette’s there again in his mouth and he’s breathing it all in, and Phil puts his hand to the side of his jaw with a tenderness long ushered away by affairs under milky skies and torn pages from novels. By pregnant women and prescription pills and therapy sessions. And _fuck_ working its way into _love_ like a mockery of using the wrong colour paint.

“Dan,” Phil manages, but doesn’t move the cigarette. He’s still got his hand on Dan’s fucking jaw and he curls it around the shape of his angular face as he breathes out smoke into the spaces between them. 

Dan can’t form words because words are fucking irrelevant when he’s sitting on a single bed with his husband, smoking a cigarette next to a dark window in Paris.

How gorgeous. How simple. How divine.

It feels like little fragments of heaven floating through his insides.

Phil’s cold hand on his face is no little or no more than an emphasis on _I’m addicted to you when you’re addicted._

He is careful when he finally moves the cigarette—after three or maybe four or maybe five hits—and he even whispers, “I’m sorry, Dan,” when Dan whines in disapproval.

“You can’t do that no more,” he says. “Go to sleep now.”

And so Dan leans back down onto Phil’s pillow and he doesn’t fucking care for anything but cigarettes and his teenage lover there with alcohol on his tongue. Phil tries to demand him to move again, but it’s another thing that’s quite irrelevant.

“Shh, Phil,” Dan is whispering. Eyes closed, heart pumping. He reaches his arms out and continues, “Lie with me, Phil, lie with me and hold me and kiss me.”

“Dan, just get out of my bed—Please, just—I can’t do this with you. Fuck you. Get out.”

“No, Phil,” Dan buries his face into the sheets. _It smells like you, it smells like_ — “Do you remember Doré, Phil? Do you remember the things you used to tell me?”

The man on the dresser is opening and closing the bathroom door. Clicking hinges, broken locks.

“What? Doré? Why are you taking about—Dan, just get _out_ of my bed.”

“No, Phil, please tell me about him,” Dan’s heart is begging and his chest is contracting around it and _you are the blue in my veins and the “my” in migraines_ and—The room is dark. The air is silent. The bathroom doors clicks and jolts and cracks back on its hinges.

Doré and his raven, Dan Howell and _nevermore_. Like _I love you, nevermore_ and _I want you, nevermore_ and he is exercising his insanity like a prisoner in an asylum. He looks out of the window and there’s a starry night. And he looks over to the man and he’s still playing with the door. And he looks over to his bed and his husband is sitting there, pulling a hoodie on his body.

“What are you doing, Phil?” he says. “Phil. What are you doing?”

“Go to sleep.”

“Phil—”

“We’re going home soon. You said twenty four hours. I need to charge my phone and look for flights.”

“No, no,” Dan sits up on his knees and nearly knocks himself sick from the force. Yellow paint sloshing in the back of his throat. Phil puked his intoxication up in the same place he did his eating disorder. “We can’t go yet, Phil, no. I want to—Louis wants me to stay.”

“Louis is just being nice,” Phil starts pulling his jeans up over his legs. “You wouldn’t know. You’re delusional. He’s too kind to tell you you’re a fucking mess, so he says ‘not well’ because that’s easier to handle or some shit.”

“Stop it, Phil,” Dan can still feel the smoke tickling in his lungs. He can still feel the raven in his heart. He wants to vomit and he wants to scream and he wants Phil to kiss away his lack of coherency. “Louis’ my friend, Louis cares about me.” 

“You said yourself he doesn’t like you, you fucking idiot,” Phil snaps. He’s put his cigarette out. “I’m booking tickets back home for tomorrow morning.”

“No, no, Phil,” Dan pleads. “You can’t. You can’t do that. Let’s wait and talk to Louis, Phil, let’s wait and see what he—”

“We need to go _home_ —”

“But you’re drinking again. You’re having a tiny child and you’re drinking again and I’ll tell her you are, Phil, I’ll ruin everything for you if you make me go,” Dan doesn’t fucking care what he’s saying because the Paris sky is black and nothing and he wants to go home but he can’t remember where it is. He can’t remember how his story works and he can’t remember how to form sentences that make him feel good about himself. That don’t involve bursts of synthetic heroin and dirty syringes and big flying machines. High off his face. Prisoners and ravens. Smoke and the sunset and sketches all over the floor.

“I hate you, Dan. Fuck you, I fucking hate you,” Phil moves out of the room and slams the bathroom door and the man is gone. He’s under the bed, or something. He’s on the ceiling, or something. There are shadows moving like contortionists around Dan’s cornea. Black and white. Black and nothing.

The city is dark and the air is silent and Dan scrambles around to find Phil’s lighter and packet of cigarettes. He sparks the flame and stares at it for a while, dragging it through the air and thinking about the shit he could destroy. It’s orange, but it’s not Louis. It’s not soft and it’s not lovely and it’s not _if you wanted, I could draw you some aliens._

Dan doesn’t know what it is.

And he’s sad and he’s tired and he’s angry. Things work well in threes. He lights his cigarettes and he sits there smoking in the darkness, on Phil’s bed with traces of Phil’s touch still on his jaw. He’s eighteen again but he’s alone and he’s scared. Somebody keeps tapping his shoulder. Something is drumming against the window. 

Dan’s meds are still in his stomach, Xs still on his wrists.

He wishes Phil Lester would talk to him about art.

He wishes Phil Lester would feed him past addictions.

He wishes they could remember how to find their way home and he wishes they’d do a better job at deciding what they feel for each other.

But, fuck.

Fuck that and fuck him.

Dan wishes they could write a painting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a longer chapter because I felt like I had to develop on a scene that focuses on the connection between D+P. Also, if it’s weird and not up to the standard of other chapters it’s because I’ve lacked creativity for the past like three days. Idk. I hope you enjoyed, let me know what you thought <3


	7. Buckles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **This chapter has a lot of deep and possibly triggering thoughts/memories. It’s probably the saddest chapter, but I’m not sure. It is for me. I feel like this entire story needs a warning, as I mentioned earlier on, but this is kinda really fucking sad.**

**number seven: buckles**

_Dan_ falls asleep again. He must do because he wakes up. And it feels like a sequence, feels like a story. Even if it’s so fucking awful that it’s seven chapters into making no sense and the sentences aren’t coming the way they used to.

He wakes up and he’s facing the window and it’s moderately lighter or moderately darker because there’s a storm on the skyline. His face is pressed into a pillow that smells like his husband, all minty and white and his mug is still in the sink. It’s colder in the room than it had been, maybe, and it’s raining so fucking hard.

“No, Phil. He doesn’t need that. That won’t help him, how could you think it would?”

“Can you please just stop fucking acting like you know him at all?” Phil’s voice is too harsh and irritated for Dan’s groggy ears to register. “He’s nothing but a psycho to you.”

“He’s nothing but a psycho to _you_ —”

“No, Louis. No, that’s wrong. He’s an absolute maniac and I hate him and I wish I’d never fucking met him, but he’s also my husband and he was also my lover and—” 

“You also cheated on him,” Louis accuses. Dan swallows the taste of milk and shuts his eyes. “I’m not trying to make this any worse for you here, Phil, but he’s manic and severely mentally ill and yet he keeps talking about you and this kid you’re about to have and it’s obviously fucked him up—”

“He was fucked up long before I had sex with Ella.”

Ella. Dan doesn’t like the way the name sounds in Phil’s voice. He doesn’t like the way his organs twist and his stomach wrenches at the reminder she is carrying his husband’s child. Little bumps and tiny fingers. Boys in blue cardigans, stitched with the sky.

“Ella?”

“She’s—”

“The girl, right,” Louis’ voice grows dismissive at the realisation. “Whatever. Her name’s irrelevant. I don’t care for her and Dan doesn’t either.”

“I’m having a _child_ with her, Louis, there has to come a time in my life when I drop Daniel fucking Howell and his broken fucking head to focus on something that makes me feel like I’m worth something—”

“ _Worth_ something?” Louis echoes. Dan’s thin fingers are touching the plaster on the wall. The paper is floral again. Pretty and nice and safe. “You feeling like you’re _not_ worth something is your fault. _Yes_ , Dan’s a mess. _Yes_ , he’s unstable to the point of professional help. Miles and miles past that but, God, Phil, he loves you. He loves you and he’s going mad for you and you distancing yourself is what’s making you feel so shitty.”

“So, what? What are you saying? If I was there every time he made himself sick, I’d feel better about myself?”

“If you looked at him and touched him and didn’t tell him you hated him, maybe you’d feel better when he told you he loved you and—”

“What if I do hate him?”

“What?”

“What if I do hate him, Louis? What if I wouldn’t give a fuck if he left and never came back? What if I wouldn’t give a fuck if he let me be there for the woman carrying my child and if he didn’t demand I leave the country to run away on some bullshit escape-fantasy he has. Like this is paradise or something. _This_ shithole is paradise—”

“You’re acting like he’s not the man you married.”

“Fuck off, Louis,” Phil is sad and angry. Tired and frightened and Dan wants to get up, wants to stagger in his haziness and wrap his arms around him and say _hey, love, you don’t have to be scared of anything._ “I don’t love him anymore. Just because _he_ still wears his fucking ring doesn’t mean I have to pretend, too. Fuck him. He ruined my life and he doesn’t even know it. I hate him.”

“Why do you hate him?” Louis has returned to patience. To the sunset. Dan doesn’t look at him because he’s got his eyes closed, but he sees orange spilling behind his eyelids.

“You don’t know anything about us.”

“Then tell me, Phil. Why do you hate him? What did he do?”

“He didn’t—He just—”

“You’re angry because he drove you to alcohol again, right? It hurts you that he’s hurting and you know you’re helplessness is worth nothing, so you drink. And then he keeps crying and pleading and making himself sick, so you do it again. And he asks you to help and you do it again because you don’t have it in you to tell him you don’t know how.”

“He used to cut his wrists, you know?” There’s suddenly a horrible laugh tinged with emotion in Phil’s voice. Dan thinks about cold weekdays and stale cigarette smoke and _I love you when you’re high in my arms but not when you’re bleeding because it stains my clothes_. “And then his thighs so I couldn’t see when we stopped having sex. And then he used to mop his fucking blood with tissues and stick them to his walls with his paintings like they were _art_ , Louis, like his pain was _pretty_. You don’t know anything about him. Fuck you, you don’t know about him. He’s in love with hurting and he gets off on his agony because it makes him write good. Sometimes I half expect him to tie a fucking noose around his throat so he’ll come up with better words.”

“He’s—” Louis doesn’t really know what to say, Dan thinks, and it must be a fucking awful thing to not have responses wired with nouns and adjectives at the start of his lips. To not know how to answer because your mind can’t handle the tragedy, the insanity. It isn’t accustomed to such dramatic phrases of self-inflicted illnesses, of bringing jagged edges to what God gifted you like you’re trying to tell him _fuck you_ by hurting yourself. Like red is blood and blood is art and Dan scratches _romanticism_ around eating disorders he’s glossed with yellow paint. Scratches _I apologise for the mess_ on the front cover of that novel he didn’t sell because, “It’s too messy, it doesn’t work.”

Because, “They don’t want to read about your instability.”

Because, “They don’t want to read about being self-conscious.”

But Dan brings his foot and he kicks at the fourth wall like it’s another literary technique for his mind to murder and he says _you’re aware that you’re reading this line._ He says _you like it when I make the words rhyme._ And Louis is the sunset but Louis doesn’t understand that his friend is a lunatic of the finest sort. He’s a genius with stories tangled like cables and a genius that lights flames of torture.

Because if Dan didn’t hurt, his words wouldn’t either.

And if Dan didn’t hurt, he’d be an awful fucking writer.

And, “He talks about art all the time to me, Phil, it’s all he’s ever interested in.”

“Because it’s his life,” Phil says. He’s having a child. “He’s made it his fucking life and he’ll kill himself before he stops. Van Gogh was a fucking _nutcase_ , ever wonder why Dan’s obsessed with him? You think it’s fine to stand there and call the shots but you’re not in this marriage with us, Louis, you haven’t fallen in and out of love with somebody who has driven himself crazy over the fact his book was never published and who writes about writing the greatest load of horse-shit in modern literature. He writes about people reading it and people liking it and he writes like they’re listening to him because he’s a _freak_.”

“Or maybe he’s just _lonely_ , Phil,” Louis is challenging him and he knows nothing but it’s nice. He knows nothing but it’s lovely. “Maybe he just needs you to love him and be there for him like you’re supposed to and—”

“And what about _me_ , Louis? What about me?” Phil’s voice cracks and crumbles around the corners. Dan buries his face in the bedsheets and focuses on the little heaves of his chest. He hasn’t been sick yet. Phil doesn’t love him anymore. The world is sad and the sky is grey and there’s rain on the window, running down the glass and bunching up in rows across the bottom. Red for school jumpers. Yellow for Van Gogh. Purple for irises and green for aliens and orange for Louis. “When do I start to matter in this shit? I’m supposed to be in recovery and I drank so much yesterday that I couldn’t even see straight and that’s _his_ fault, that’s _his_ fucking fault—”

“Then his pain is your fault, right?” Louis retaliates.

Bul, bul—

—ympia.

It’s all a mess of words and colours, Dan thinks, sad things inked down onto a page to build the structure of a sad story.

“I haven’t done shit to him,” Phil says, and Dan would hate him if he wasn’t crying. It’s raining heavier and quicker and he wants a cigarette. He wants Louis to leave so Phil can make him hurt, and he can write about it. He can do what he does best, use what God _really_ gifted him if he gifted him anything at all.

“You’re just as bad as each other, Phil. You can’t blame him and not let him blame you. Why is it so easy for you to hurt him?”

“Because it’s so easy for him to hurt _me_ and—”

“And I don’t _care_ , Phil. When people are sick, you fucking take care of them.”

“You know fuck all about us, Louis, just go, just get out—”

There’s a bump and a clatter and then Louis says, “You love him.”

Phil says, “I don’t.”

One of them is right, but Dan is damned if he gives a shit who. Damned if he cares and damned if he doesn’t and he wishes somebody had just told Jesus Christ he wasn’t worth the fucking nails. He wasn’t worth the fucking pain. He wishes somebody had told him that he was giving his life for city pollution, materialism and dirty syringes scattered across cluttered floors. For riots and shields, overdoses on prescription pills and livelihoods constructed on superficiality. For protestors and democracies. For _that’s just the way it is_ and _stop crying, life isn’t fair_ and for cash in waistbands, girls on corners. For boys who learn where to put their fingers on weapons but are too frightened to ask where to put them on their boyfriend.

And Dan thinks about the baby on the big flying machine and wishes he’d said a prayer for him, turned to his mother and told her, “Raise him to know that he has to fight for what he wants because this world doesn’t give a shit if he makes it or he doesn’t.”

He wishes he could be there to cradle the baby and hold him while he sleeps.

To tell him stories about Doré and Van Gogh and Louis’ aliens. And the animals in Noah’s Ark, the grass beneath Adam’s feet. The eye behind the first telescope and the mind behind the first novel and the reasoning behind his first love.

Dan wishes he could write him poems to make him happy and remind him, every so often, “Things are not as they should be.”

They may never be again.

And that it’s okay to want to go home sometimes because everybody else does, too.

Phil says, “I don’t,” and he’s a fucking liar.

Louis says, “You can’t leave. You guys have no money. I’ll have no contact with you and I don’t trust you with each other on your own—”

“We don’t need your fucking charity,” Dan’s husband is still crying. “Just go, Louis, fucking hell. Go and never come back. Stop bringing breakfast, stop bringing cigarettes. He doesn’t need you.”

“No, he needs you. But he needs me to tell you that.”

“ _Louis_ ,” There’s another clatter. Dan’s head is fucking spinning. It’s the middle of the night and he’s twelve years old. “Go, please. Before he wakes up and sees you and—”

“I could take him to Arles,” The words swim to Dan’s heart, all the way through his blood stream and in between his arteries to settle between the cracks. “Do you hear me, Phil? I could take him to Arles, both of you. I have the money.”

“How the fuck is that going to help anything?”

And then there’s more words and more crying and more _fuck off, fuck off, fuck off_ before the door slams but Dan doesn’t care for it. His mind is in Arles, stuck to it like somebody has layered it with glue. Over and over and over. His psychiatrist tells him that insanity is repetition and he and his husband are just as bad as each other, but his psychiatrist doesn’t know anything. His psychiatrist doesn’t know that Van Gogh painted in Arles and he used to eat yellow paint and Dan wants to drown in his gorgeous fucking paintings.

When Louis is gone, Dan gets out of bed.

Phil is pacing with an unopened bottle of alcohol and he halts immediately. He’s crying, dragging his shirt over his face.

Arles, Arles, Arles.

Things work well in threes.

A psychotic’s antibiotic is another fucking addict and maybe things work well if you just make them fucking work.

“Dan. Where the fuck are you going? _Dan_.”

Dan goes into the bathroom and the rain is loud on the thin glass and he has a tendency for writing when he knows he should stop. He has a tendency for saying things that will piss people off, so _fuck you for telling me I can’t do it well_ and _fuck you for telling me you know what I want._ And he thinks about his mother, even if she isn’t there. He thinks about her because she drove him to pack his bags and smoke weed with his teenage lover but she said she couldn’t make it to his fucking wedding. She said she loved him and she said she hated him.

She said she wanted to see him happy.

She said she wanted him to stop talking about Van Gogh.

She said she knew he had to lose weight, but _there are bigger goddamn problems in the world, you attention-seeking little_ —

Dan opens his mouth and puts his fingers down his throat and vomits the words she spat at him all over the fucking surface. He’s hunched too far back from the toilet and his bones are brittle like the golden-brown leaves of autumn under too-heavy boots. Orange skies and orange sunsets and the cool breezes of open backdoors, riding bikes in shorts and racing up streets with strawberry ice-cream smeared in the corner of your mouth. Dan thinks about red and he thinks about Saturday afternoons. He thinks about his childhood as he strains his scratched throat and vomits on the tiles and it’s a sequence, of sorts. It’s space pyjamas and stabilisers and _aliens, aliens, aliens_ and his mother lifting his head back with red nails through his hair, clenching and hissing and, “Just fucking _eat_ it, I won’t tell you again.”

And a phone call to your boyfriend when they’re screaming too loud. A phone call to your boyfriend when your brother’s sleeping next to you because he’s frightened and he’s lonely and _help me, help me, help me._

_I can’t do this by myself. I can’t do this anymore._

_Yes, you can. Do you want to me to come over? ___

__Little pieces of a staticky silence, hands cupped over receivers and no voices downstairs._ _

__Dan’s stomach is heaving and churning and his fingers are white with their grip on the sink above his head. The bathroom door goes and he’s cold and he’s empty and it’s raining like it did that day in Manchester and—_ _

__“Dan, fucking hell,” Phil Lester is lovely and Phil Lester is kind. Phil Lester is the voice through fear and sadness, bul—ympia and depression. The voice through loneliness and _I’m so fucking ugly_ , through no money and no sanity and nobody to fall back on and he’s there in the bathroom with his arms around—_ _

__“N-No, Phil, I—” Dan always cries when he pukes. He had a stomach bug when he was seven and he cried harder than he vomited. And he wiped his mouth on his pyjamas, wiped his tears on his sleeves and he does the same when he’s thirty something because’s going to fucking die._ _

__He’s already fucking dying._ _

__“Stop it, Dan, come to the toilet,” Phil hooks his arm under Dan’s frail body and lifts him forward. Easy and nothing. Thin and nothing. Married and nothing and _what if I do hate him?__ _

__Dan is shaking his head and sobbing into the toilet, heaving and spluttering and Phil is smoothing his hand down over the back of his hair._ _

__“M-My mom came to see me, Phil,” Dan chokes. “She c-came to see me and you don’t believe me and I want to go to Arles and—”_ _

__“Shh, Dan,” Phil hushes him. He stills the motion of his hand to thread his fingers through his hair and Dan can’t see anything, but he thinks he reaches for him. Thinks he finds him. “Shut up, Dan, just be sick. Just be sick, are you finished?”_ _

__“N-No, I’m—”_ _

More and more. Over and over and _you will fucking eat what I give you, you will fucking do what I tell you._

__“No, please,” Dan hears the rasp in her voice, smells the scent of her perfume. It tickles at his nose and his zero-to-nothing-stability buckles under its weight. “L-Leave me alone, please leave me _alone_ —”_ _

__“What?” Phil’s fingers are still there, not moving on the back of Dan’s head. He’s resting on his knees on the tiles and his book sold a million copies and Dan is so fucking proud of him. “What’s the matter? Dan, who are you talking to?”_ _

__“I don’t want to be with her anymore, Phil, she h-hates me, she s-scares me—”_ _

__He’s shaking and sobbing when Phil flushes the chain and he’s eighteen again when he lifts him to his feet. “Can you—Can you walk to bed?”_ _

__And it’s not enough to say _no, Phil, carry me and hold me and love me_ so Dan doesn’t say it. He staggers and stumbles, trips and crawls and Phil is trying not to touch him but it’s so fucking hard. It’s so fucking yellow and so fucking red. Dan feels like his ribs have cascaded down into the emptiness of his stomach and his throat is burning when he settles onto a messy bed._ _

__Like _fuck_ does he care which one._ _

__The wallpaper is the cosmos and the city all dreary._ _

__“D-Don’t let her get me, Phil, please don’t l-let her touch me,” Dan knows she’s there outside the door, messing with the lock and trying to get in and he knows she’s there exercising his insanity. “Let me have your j-jacket, Phil, so she can’t hurt me—”_ _

__“You’re not having my jacket,” Phil is right there at the side of the single bed. Dan can’t see him through his mess but he’s reaching out for him again. Over and over and—_ _

__“P-Phil, I—”_ _

__“Shut up,” Phil interrupts, but it’s so soft and so orange and so _I’ll love you for a little longer because you want me and I want you but fuck you, I hate you._ He doesn’t do anything when Dan finds him, grabs onto him and clings to his shirt and he’s like the baby with the sky-stitched cardigan when he whimpers for misfortune’s pity._ _

__“Let me—” Phil is turning away slightly from Dan’s too-desperate hands. “Let me get you a cigarette, Dan, do you want another cigarette?”_ _

__“Yeah, Phil,” Dan cries. “I want a cigarette, Phil. Don’t leave me, you can’t leave me, it’s cold and it’s raining and—”_ _

__“Shh, just let me light this for you,” Phil carefully pries Dan’s touch from his body and flicks a little flame to the end of a cigarette. And he doesn’t even take a puff for himself— _selfish fucking bastard, I couldn’t you more if I tried_ —before lifting Dan’s face in hands and putting it between his lips._ _

__“Breathe,” he whispers, like he knows nothing and he’s in love. “Breathe for me, Dan, nice and slow and—”_ _

__Dan does as he’s told. He does as he’s told because it’s Phil and he adores him. He’s mad for him, high for him. Broke for him and empty for him and he’s still wearing his fucking ring._ _

__The smoke tastes different to the way it did yesterday. And Dan wants Louis to take him to Arles, so maybe that’s it, but it tastes so warm and so gentle. So easy on his sore throat._ _

__“That’s it, there you go,” Phil’s thumb moves slightly up over Dan’s cheekbone. He’s still holding the cigarette. “And again, Dan, just—Just breathe and close your eyes and don’t let her get to you.”_ _

__“Phil,” Dan whimpers, tiny hands coming to shift the cigarette a short distance from his mouth. “Tell me about Doré.”_ _

__Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy._ _

__“No, Dan,” Phil says, quietly. It’s pencil-fine and Louis-soft and he’s staring at the cigarette between them. “Not now, okay? I can’t. Not anymore.”_ _

__“Why, Phil? Please, I—We can go back home. To London and to your baby and to Ella. We can go if you tell me about Doré, I promise, Phil,” Dan reaches forward to put his fingers around Phil’s hand feeding him the cigarette. The touch is careful, vigilant. Dan cares too much about everything and it’s ironic the world has never cared about him. His arms are for cradling babies, his hands for stroking little animals. His fingers are for rings golden with nights spent curled up to lovers and his smile is for the sun’s shine because the sun is overrated. He’s dead heart in a dead French hotel when he says, “Tell me about Noah’s Ark, Phil.”_ _

__“Noah’s Ark?” Phil’s echo is a murmur. “Why do you want me to—Dan, you don’t—I don’t—”_ _

__“Will you tell your baby stories when it’s born, Phil?”_ _

__There’s a twitch in Phil’s jaw, a flaw in his somewhat fabricated facade. Dan wants to tell him that he’s sorry for everything and he can’t remember if he believes in God, if he washed his mug up in the sink or if the greatest painting is the sunflowers. Eighteen eighty seven. If he’s going to Arles. If he’s allowed to smoke now. If he packed his favourite book. If Van Gogh died Gauguin’s friend. If he ate yellow paint because it made him happy, or because he was fucking insane._ _

__“Stop talking now,” Phil is hushing him, trying to feed him the cigarette again. _Shut up, just shut up._ Dan is eighteen and he’s in his boyfriend’s bedroom and his eyes are wild and dilated, like he’s inhaled too much too quickly. They’re a couple addicts on an off-coloured carpet, a couple writers speaking in bullets with no targets to hit and no targets to miss. And they come back like boomerangs, sort-of, come back to slide between their fingers just be sent right off again._ _

__Because their love is fleeting and their words are tender. Constructed of fleshy syllables, disregarded connotations, and the world is yellow and the world is red._ _

__There’s so much fucking pain._ _

__Paintings long lost and long forgotten, colours smudged and oils running. Children raised on the likelihood of being nothing at all, like they could never find their way without walking in their parents’ footsteps. Like _I want to be a writer_ and _congratulations_ but _ pick something real._ Because it won’t work out, they said. Because you can’t live your life on it, they said. And Dan blames education for his wrecked fucking head, as much as he blames his parents. As much as he blames his husband. As much as he blames his psychiatrist.

You’re not good enough, they said.

You will never be good enough.

And Dan scrawls _fuck you_ down with the letters not between the lines because he never fucking listened and he never fucking allowed himself to follow the flock of kids who were told not to fly because they might fucking _fall._ Who were told what to do and told what to be, and were told that having artistic ability was irrelevant and worthless and it would never get them anywhere. And Dan thinks that what they meant by that was not being able to afford a loaf of bread, but his words have heaved him out of suicide on the seventh floor of a block of flats on a grey, weekday morning. They’re soaked in courage and he’s eaten them from the page and he wants to tell them that he _tried_ because a dictionary showed him how. He wants to tell them he staggers around like he’s a genetic modification of Shakespearean syntax and an angry hip-hop artist because he fucking taught himself how to take language and use it to tell them _I’ve always been good enough and you’ll never be fucking better than me._

There’s so much pain and Dan’s words hurt because he’s taking the pain and channeling it through. Paragraphs written beside prescription pills and chapters written in seventeen minutes. Van Gogh and Doré, Gauguin and sunflowers and guest rooms and canvases and Dan’s not trying to educate anymore than he’s trying to feel.

He’s good because he’s sick. He’s good because he’s a lunatic. He’s good because he chokes the agony out of his skin and watches it run across the page like the rain on Paris windows and maybe the author is the character, or some shit.

Maybe Van Gogh was the prisoner, or some shit.

And, “Tell me about Noah’s Ark, Phil. Louis wants to take me to Arles.”

“I know. But we can’t go.”

“We can. Please, Phil,” Dan’s eyes are glazed and lungs thick with smoke. He wonders how many more times he’ll have to puke up his insides for them to stop working. “Do you think I’m sick, Phil? Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Yes,” Phil says, and there’s not a moment of hesitation. “Because you are. But it makes you write good, doesn’t it, so you like it?”

“My head’s sore,” Dan runs careful fingers through his fringe. “And it makes sore things that people think are pretty.”

“Who does?”

“Everybody, Phil, everybody thinks that—Tell me about Doré. Tell me what he used to do. Do you believe in aliens now? Did Doré believe in aliens?”

“Stop talking, Dan,” Phil shakes his head and feeds him the cigarette again. “We can’t talk anymore. We can’t see Louis and we can’t go to Arles.”

“Please, Phil,” Dan says, after he’s pushed the cigarette away. He wants it, but not nearly as much as he wants to go to Arles. Not nearly as much as he wants Phil to talk to him. His addiction to cigarettes is old and stale, left for nothing in the emptiness of his eighteenth year. “We can go right now, Louis said. I heard him, I heard him say it. We can go, Phil— _Please_ , Phil, I want to go to Arles.”

“What the fuck is your obsession with it?” Phil has taken the cigarette for himself after Dan’s refusal.

“It’s in France, you know? Arles. Van Gogh used to be there. Van Gogh used to love there. He used to eat yellow paint there because it made him happy.”

Phil’s turned away from him. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed and Dan’s throat is burning. His mother’s not here anymore because she doesn’t care for his husband, like she doesn’t care for watching her son vomit across the tiles as if he’s that desperate to rid himself of the shit she made him feel. Because he’s not what she wants him to be and he’s not what she told him to be and everything he’s ever done, he’s done to make her happy.

Like that time he slept with a woman because he couldn’t stop thinking about the taste of Phil Lester’s mouth, and his father’s voice played like background noise to the feeling of her fingers over his spine.

Perfume up his nostrils and _you’re not gay._ Knuckles above his hips and fingers around his wrists and saliva across his neck and _you are not fucking gay._

Pink hoodies to get him through the night. Bubble gum and ice cream and strawberry milk. Addiction and nail-polish and lipstick stains across his teeth and _you are not fucking gay, Dan, you are not fucking gay._

Blue eyes between white sheets. The places Phil liked to be touched, the roughness of his palms and the warmth of his mouth and the sound of his voice when they were drunk and had sex on the tiles. Hands up through curls and damp kisses smeared in vodka and _I’m not fucking gay, dad, don’t tell mom, I—_

_—don’t love you, Phil, I don’t love you._

And then the weak hours of the morning turned into the hard hours of the night, pink into red and blue into grey and Dan’s father moved up the county somewhere and his mother started fucking around with Luvox. Xanax. Prozac and Celexa and orange caps on white bottles, the boys who need a father and the stigmatised single mother and _we can survive it, don’t say we fucking can’t._ No more bruises and no more screaming, no more frightened siblings and stilted silences but a woman popping pills in the shadows of yesterday and the overcast of tomorrow.

Two children. Bigger problems.

_I wish you were fucking dead._

Drawings on the refrigerator door torn down by thin hands—nails red and angry—and Dan wishes he was there to replace them with sheets of paper soaked in his own blood. Red and red and school jumpers, gums in mirrors between the white of teeth and _what colour is my writing?_

Dan wishes he was there to write words to his mother that made her cry.

He wishes he was there to recite a paragraph on the derivation of his hysteria and title it her name.

Because sometimes people don’t get it but sometimes people do, and you can decipher between the two with _does it hurt you when I say sad shit, or does it make no fucking sense?_

Phil gets up in Paris and Dan loses his train of thought, feels it run off the tracks and Manchester, Manchester, Manchest—

—er Station, wrapped up in pale arms. A nose against a cheekbone and a nudge in the side, all soft and gentle-like and they were the sunset before they were the sunshine or maybe Dan just likes it better that way because it rhymes.

“Are we going to Arles, Phil?” he says. He’s got a water bottle in his hands and his throat is cool. “We need to find the yellow house, we need to—”

“We can’t go anywhere if I don’t clean up the mess in the bathroom,” Phil’s bottle is of liquor and his hands are around its neck. “And we need to think about going home.”

“No, Phil, please,” Dan cries. “Light another cigarette and feed it me and talk to me about Doré.”

“Just stop it, Dan,” Phil whispers, with a shake of his head. “You need to stop it now. I helped you and—and no more.”

_Nevermore._

“You should shower and change,” Dan’s husband continues. Van Gogh and Arles and sunflowers. The walls are yellow. “You’ve been wearing those pyjamas for too long. There’s clothes for you in the bag, I packed them with your meds.”

Dan looks down and there are Xs on his wrists.

“Thanks, Phil,” he says, and Phil turns to look at him with strange eyes. He echoes the word himself under his breath and then starts to head over to the bathroom with his still unopened bottle in his hands, after kicking the bag to Dan.

“Get your shit out of there and then come take a shower,” Phil stops at the door. “Can you do that?”

“Doré,” Dan whispers. “Are you not going to tell me about Doré?”

“ _No_ , Dan, I fucking told you. Please, just do what I say. You need to—You have to try and get back on your feet before we go home.”

And Dan doesn’t remember what that means, but Phil’s already gone into the bathroom. So he reaches down and he picks up the bag and there’s some pills and some clothes and a book.

It’s Phil’s book, and everything is yellow.

Dan hasn’t seen it for so long and he wants to ask him if he still thinks about it—if he packed it because it reminds him of the eighteenth year and everything around it—and if he’d still read it to him if he told him he was sad.

If he told him he can’t remember if he believes in God or if he washed his mug up in the sink or if he’s going to Arles.

If he’s allowed to smoke now.

If Van Gogh died Gauguin’s friend.

If he ate yellow paint because it made him happy, or because he was fucking insane.

Dan doesn’t know if Phil would care.

Two men. Bigger problems.

Everything is grey.


	8. Emoticon

**number eight: emoticon**

_Phil_ wrote a book a long time ago and it sold a million copies. And Van Gogh painted a picture and it never sold any, but Dan doesn’t care for it. Art is art. Words are paint. Literature is genius, and all that shit. Nobody gives a fuck anyway.

Everything is still grey when he puts Phil Lester’s book down on the bed and retrieves an oversized hoodie from his bag. His pills are there and he wonders why nobody’s asked him to take them yet. Or maybe they fucking have and he can’t remember, because he can’t remember anything.

Literature is genius, or some shit.

Everything is nothing.

He picks Phil’s book up and carries it with his hoodie, standing with precarious footing. His knees are buckles and his something is something else and it’s raining so heavy on the narrow glass, sky sputtering and cracking in all the wrong places and Dan thinks they call it thunder. Thinks they say it occurs when God is angry and he’s trying to tell us we’ve done something wrong. He’s acting on metaphors of fists against countertops and voices against thin walls.

Or some shit.

Nobody gives a fuck anyway.

Dan doesn’t turn to look out of the window before entering the bathroom. It takes him a while to understand the door’s handle and to understand why his husband is on the tiles.

Vomit. Mothers. Pale hands, black hair. There to feed him a cigarette and clean his mess and read him a novel that sold too many copies and—

_It was supposed to be for me, Phil. Just for me. It was our story._

“I’ll start the shower for you in a minute,” Phil says from on the floor. Dan’s looking at the patterns on the frosted glass. “Sit down on the toilet lid and just wait. Don’t do anything, don’t touch anything. Okay?”

Dan’s feet are cold on the floor and he looks down, but he doesn’t know if he’s wearing shoes. Doesn’t know if he’s in Paris or Arles or London. Manchester or Amsterdam. He sits and he says, “Phil.”

There’s nothing.

It’s everything for a while.

“Phil.”

“Yeah?” Phil glances up. Ocean eyes, strong tides and shit to wash up on the sand. Yellow and blue, but black when the day rolls in. “What, Dan?”

“Did Gauguin like Van Gogh’s sunflowers?”

Phil stares at him for a moment, then lifts a hand to squeeze the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, Dan,” he manages, and Dan fiddles with the tassels on his hoodie like he’s going to use them to figuratively depict him choking the life out of all he’s been given, all he knows. Colours and words and artists. Places, capital cities. 

The sky is grey.

“It’s still raining, Phil,” Dan mumbles, at the tender rush on the window. “Can you hear it? If I went outside, would I feel it?”

“Yes,” Phil says. “You’d feel it.”

“And would it soak my pyjamas? Would it make me cold?”

And Dan is nine, holding his mother’s hand and splashing up the pavement on the route to school. Yellow boots and milky skies and days that feel like their ends have been tampered with, stretched and drawn out and measured by the little hands of clocks on walls. Tiny fingers. Sky-stitched cardigans. Nothing is pretty and nothing is kind.

“Yes, Dan. It would make you cold.”

Dan thinks for a moment because he can’t remember what he wants to say. He thinks because the world is spinning and nobody knows why and neither do they seem interested in ever finding out. Like they’re content not knowing why Mars is red and aliens are green or yellow or grey. Purple for irises and orange for Louis and they’re not Phil’s aliens because Phil doesn’t believe in them.

“You know that baby, Phil?”

“What baby?”

“The one we saw, the one with the blue cardigan,” Dan’s voice is small and angled high, smeared in definitions of insanity and vulnerability like the book nobody would want to read. “On the big flying machine.”

Phil seems to falter at the name. It’s there under his skin, running through his blood with the red all around it but the blue in its heart and Phil doesn’t need to say anything for Dan to hear _I remember, I remember, I remember._

“What about the baby?” he says.

“I wish I could’ve held him,” Dan whispers, to his husband on the tiles. “Or touched him. He was so tiny and so gentle, Phil, and I promise I wouldn’t have hurt him.”

“How do you even fucking remember him? You—You can’t remember to shower and yet you remember some random child on a plane?”

“He wasn’t a random child, Phil, he was so pretty. He was sleeping and he was safe and he was happy and—” Dan stops talking when Phil stands up and starts washing his hands in the sink. He reaches over and drags his fingers under the running water, flinching at the cool temperature. Phil takes his wrist and moves it away and his touch burns, settles between his bones like it couldn’t leave even if it wanted to.

“Sit still,” Phil tells him. “Just sit there and listen to me, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” The words are shadowed by a whimper and it’s like Dan’s reached into earlier days to pull and retrieve shit that makes no sense. Shit that nobody cares about. Shit that pushes his husband away, sends him running and packing and leaving and Dan just wants to be kissed so hard he can’t remember why Van Gogh painted sunflowers. So hard he can taste yellow paint trailed along Phil’s tongue and he’s reminded why he’s still walking and breathing for him.

Why he fucking bothers for anyone or anything, when he’s sitting in space pyjamas and stringing up galaxies and his brother doesn’t talk to him anymore. When he’s starting sentences with the same word like repetition is a reflection on his state of mind. Over and over and over. One, two, three. Numbers aren’t something Dan’s ever been able to toy with, but he’s good with zeroes and he’s good with nines and he’s good with defining their sequences in his mind. Because he’s always been excellent at reiteration, like he’s a walking metaphor of the shit you will never forget.

The colour of Louis’ aliens.

The numbers on his fingers.

The paint Van Gogh used to eat.

And two men with bigger problems, floral wallpaper and the bedroom in Arles and _what colour is my writing?_ A shitty little bathroom with running water and no mugs. And no peace and no paintings and no air in lungs, no blood in veins and words in voices and—

“Dan,” Phil is saying. Stern. Stranger. It’s still raining in Paris. “Are you even listening to me?”

Dan starts shaking his head like he’s measured the difference between each turn. “I want to go to Arles, Phil. Where it doesn’t rain and where I won’t get wet and where Louis won’t shout at you.”

“Louis will still shout at me in Arles,” Phil says. He’s drying his hands, or some shit. Dan’s still sitting on the toilet or maybe he’s on the floor or maybe he’s resting against the side of the bathtub. “He doesn’t really care, you know?”

“Who, Phil?” Dan murmurs.

“Louis. Louis doesn’t really care. He’s just too nice to tell you you’re out of your fucking mind, so he’s polite and all that bullshit,” Phil’s laugh soaks into the air and Dan’s drowning under the sensation of it washing over his skin. Acrylics and psychotics and days numbed by narcotics, eyes peeking between fingers and mirrors with cracks ready to rupture the glass. Red tissues and green aliens.

One who doesn’t believe and one doesn’t know, but nothing can hurt you if you don’t believe it.

Nothing can hurt you if you don’t allow it.

“Louis is the sunset, Phil,” Dan’s voice is yellow in its response. “He’s kind and he’s lovely. He’s orange, don’t you think? He let me tell him about the prisoners.”

“Prisoners? What fucking prisoners?”

“Exercising, Phil,” Dan says. He’s sure he’s smiling, sure of the strange feeling in his tummy like he’s eaten something he shouldn’t have and poisoned his fucking insides. “Van Gogh. You know the one.”

“ _Prisoners Exercising_? The painting? You’ve spoken to Louis about—Why would you talk to him about that?”

“He has it in his apartment. It’s so white, Phil, it’s so clean and so—” White, white, powders. Hospital floors and sterilised counters and snowflakes on tongues. Teeth, coke and milk. “I told him about Van Gogh and he listened and we talked and—and his favourite painting is dark and gloomy. _The Potato Eaters_. He used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.”

“He didn’t eat yellow paint, Dan,” Phil is yanking on the shower curtain trailed around the bathtub because it’s old and stiff. “He didn’t, he never did. It’s a lie, some bullshit tale. Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint. They just say that because it makes his insanity seem creative and makes him look like the artist they want him to be, but he never was. Do you hear me? Stop fucking saying it now, he didn’t eat yellow paint.”

“Yes, he did,” Dan’s voice is so tired but so defensive. Plucked with courage, energy waiting for its cue to disintegrate. “He ate yellow paint, Phil. He ate it and it made him happy and you don’t know anything about Van Gogh—”

“I told you everything you fucking know about Van Gogh,” Phil has turned on the water and it’s running from the shower-head. “Can you deal with this? When was the last time you showered? You’re not going to scold yourself, are you? Dan. This is for the hot water, look at me. This is hot.”

“I know, Phil, I know,” Dan nods, but he’s staring at the tiles. The cracks between them, dividing them up, all look like roads with dead ends. Look like lanes with distant drivers and headlights to guide them through the nothingness.

“You’re not even fucking looking at it,” Phil snaps. “Dan, this is important. It’s dangerous. Tell me which is for hot water.”

And Dan doesn’t know and Dan doesn’t care. He’s just sitting on the toilet lid staring down at the lined-spaces between the tiles like they’re going to take him somewhere if he thinks hard enough. If he reaches in and lays out the words, spreads them through his head and makes himself believe that he’s going to fucking drive away into the sunset. Drive towards Louis, whom he wishes terribly he was in love with.

Because Louis would be excellent to fall for, Dan thinks. Pretty and lovely and kind. But he’s a little like that girl Dan fucked for his father’s shame and he’d only ever be in love with Louis if he was doing it for someone else.

Or some shit.

Nobody gives a fuck.

“I don’t know, Phil,” Dan’s said it so much he can hear it in the corners of silence, echoing and pleading and weaving through the quiet. “Can you stay with me? Are you going to leave me?”

“Which one is for hot water? Fucking answer me, Dan, or I—”

“I don’t know, Phil—Please, I don’t know,” Dan rubs his hands over his face. He’s shaking. “Stay with me, Phil, I don’t want to be on my own.”

“Just—” Phil is holding is breath. Dan wonders about the thoughts scurrying through his skull, wonders if he’d push him away if he tried to run his fingers through his black hair. “Take your shit off. Take your shit off, the water’s as warm as it’s gonna get.”

“I don’t want to take my pyjamas off, Phil,” Dan whines. He shuffles his sleeves down his wrists and bunches them in his hands. The fabric is soft on his palms. “I like them, they’re nice. Space, see? Look, Phil. What colour are your aliens?”

“Please, just take them off,” Phil isn’t looking at him. He’s sad and tired and angry. Sad and tired and angry. Things work well if you make them work. “Come on, Dan, please. We’re wasting water. Do you really need me to fucking do it for you?”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan is fiddling with his buttons and it’s raining on the glass and Phil releases the shower curtain, moves through the tiny room and tenderly takes Dan’s hands from his clothes. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. Dan’s father left him and Louis has orange aliens and— “Louis is going to draw me his aliens, Phil. Did you know? He said you loved me to the moon and back.”

Phil shakes his head. His fingers are unclipping the buttons on Dan’s pyjama shirt and the unopened bottle of liquor is sitting on the side of the sink. His touch is cool against Dan’s chest and the world is spinning too fast or too slow, and they’re eighteen and they’re a little older and the kitchen floor is busy with vodka bottles and—

Dan loves him and Dan’s mad for him and Jesus died for him and the sky is grey for him. The rain is cold for him. The sun shines for him. Dan’s veins are blue for him, heart empty for him. He wishes he was eighteen and sleeping against his pale skin and white, white, white. Milk and teeth and coke.

“Hey—Dan, hey,” Phil puts his hand to Dan’s jaw and Dan looks at him through hazy eyes. Dark like blemishes in the bottom of mugs. There are no galaxies over his chest anymore and there’s a mirror on the windowsill, reflecting across his body. Thin. Scrawny. He’s terrified of everything. “Can you take the rest off for me? Can you do it by yourself?”

And then his pale fingers dip to the waistband of the pyjama bottoms. “These, Dan. Can you do that?”

And Dan’s sanity shifts around _fuck, no_ because as if he’s capable of doing anything alone. As if the earth has ever span at the pace he desires, as if it’s ever given him what he wants. Jesus fucking Christ died for him, but he was a selfish fucking bastard. Nobody gives a fuck, Dan wants to tell him. Nobody gives a fuck because it’s probably bullshit and nihilist narrators are generic and boring but he doesn’t believe as he stands there in the Paris bathroom. Husband’s hands on him. Ribs against his skin.

He’d say a prayer, but he doesn’t know how.

Dan Howell doesn’t know what he’d pray for and he’s thankful he’s never been asked.

Because it would be the baby on the big flying machine, or some shit. The children in the Middle East, mentalities splintered by lack of education and socialisation and the government’s grey matter that died of thirst because they left it in the sun too long. Dan would pray for more water and pray for more consideration, pray for more yellow and pray for more patience. Pray for Louis’ aliens and the men dressed in white, the straitjackets and the brainsick and the space fucking pyjamas. The boys in love with boys and girls in love with girls. The moonlight on darker skin, the racism akin to neglected school systems and built-in antipathy and Dan would fucking pray for you to teach them how to love. To tolerate and to respect, to consider and to know that arguments are never not dual-sided and people are never not right. He would pray for fewer casualties and pray for fewer soldiers, recruited and slaughtered and conflicted by generals. For fewer teenagers with bloodstreams of liquor and heroin-filthy consciences and broken moral compasses. For calmer protests, better novels and the publication of his story. For a child to hold and a husband to listen and a mother to breathe.

Dan would pray for the world if somebody asked him, but they don’t and so everything will remain.

And then Phil whispers, “Are you okay?” and Dan realises nobody gives a fuck and he just wants to be held and touched and kissed and loved.

Eight months.

The stars shine for his misfortune, but never for his success. His ribs are strange and ugly and he’s staring down at his chest and the revealed area of his hips and he thinks he could join a circus. Thinks he could walk tightropes or dress like a clown, let them prod at his frame and his broken-up skin and take what they want of his sense. Of his trauma and his illness and his heartache.

“Dan,” Phil’s hand is there again, faint on his jaw. His eyes are oceans in the middle of August, when the waves are slow and careful and the sun is washed up under the roll of the tide. “Are you okay?”

Dan whimpers, or some shit. Brings his little hands to his face and rubs his knuckles over his eyes like a child, like a baby, and he wishes he had a cigarette to smoke or a hit to shoot. He wishes he could cut himself open and study his insides and note down all the ways they speak of his secrets. Two fingers down his throat and a shrivelled stomach. Pointed elbows and ugly faces and _eat your fucking dinner, I worked for that food._

Food.

Food.

Weekday mornings and butter knives, milk and cereal and streaks of bacon. Mugs of sugary tea. Chocolate, coffee.

“Dan, look at me,” Phil’s got his other hand around Dan's face, thumbs touching his cheeks. “Let me—I’ll take it off for you, okay? Okay, Dan?”

Dan’s nod is small and slight. There’s nothing and there’s never been anything and he wishes he had something like Van Gogh had yellow paint. Something to live for and something to die for.

He wishes he could have written a book and sold a million copies and people could have loved him and people could have talked to him. People would have said his name and wanted to make him happy. His mother might have rang him, voice quiet and controlled as the sunset blanched into the sky and his brother might have written him a “thank you” card, signed with _thank you for protecting me when you should have been yourself._

Phil doesn't so much as flinch when Dan shuffles closer to him and buries his face in his shirt as he carefully drags his clothes from his tiny body.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“He said you loved me to the moon and back,” Dan’s crying into his shoulder, nudging his nose against his clothes and he smells of smoke and he smells of alcohol and he smells of yellow paint. Smells of six on a dreary morning in a dingy Paris hotel.

“Shh, Dan,” Phil hushes him, smooths his hand over the back of his hair. It’s faint and weak and he doesn’t want it, doesn’t like it, but he does it. Dan is ecstasy. Dan is coke. Literature is genius and words are paint. “Come on, come and get in the shower now. Come on, Dan.”

Phil’s hand is there on Dan’s back, gently pushing him towards the shower. Dan’s knees are bare and shaking and he starts sobbing when he reaches the side of the bath, choking on _I’m so ugly_ and _I cry too fucking much_ and Phil hooks an arm around his waist. “Move closer,” he whispers. “Don’t cry. I’ll lift you.”

Everything is grey.

There’s rainwater rushing down the curbs of sidewalks and curves of streets. Men in business suits, women in blouses. Tiny houses and pieces of shitty glass and leaks in efficient saucepans.

“Don’t cry,” Phil says again. Dan is tense in his arms. “Shh, please. Please, don’t cry. You don’t have to—Fuck, just relax a little and don’t fight me and I’ll lift you in, okay?”

“No, Phil,” Dan sobs. His father hit his mother. Red, red, red. “N-No, please, Phil—”

“What, Dan?” Phil’s standing with a gentle arm balancing on Dan’s hip. “Why are you crying?”

“I-I wish he was happy, Phil—I wish he was happy a-and I wish somebody w-would listen to me and—”

“Jesus,” Phil’s hand shifts but Dan can’t see where it moves through his hair. Backs turned, water running. Bigger problems. “I’m listening to you, okay? Stop crying, Dan, just—Get in the shower and tell me what you want to tell me. Are you going to let me lift you?”

“I-I want to talk about Van Gogh, Phil,” Dan has his hands over his eyes because everything is cold and everything is grey and he’s terrified of himself. Terrified of the dark too, but more of himself than anything in the world. Because the man on the dresser is himself and the shadows down the hall are himself and the trip to Paris is himself and the aliens in the sky are himself and— “Please, Phil, l-listen to me talk about—”

“I said I would, I said it,” There’s urgency threaded through the quiet of Phil’s voice. He hooks his hands under Dan’s arms. “Let me lift you now, you weigh fucking nothing and we’re wasting water—”

Weigh.

Dan’s too tired to explain what the word means. He can’t be fucking bothered to describe the way it sounds on his vulnerable ears and tastes down his scratched throat and feels in his hoarse voice when Phil lifts him into the tub and he murmurs, “I weigh, I weigh, I weigh,” with clenched fists. The water is cold and powerful, but it doesn’t wash it away. Dan stares at the plughole and watches little letters float from his body, and yet none of them are “w” and none of them “e”, or “i” or “g” or “h” or—

Weigh, weigh, weigh.

But, “Nobody gives a fuck, Dan.”

Nobody gives a fuck.

“Why are you sitting down?” Phil’s knelt down at the side of the tub, mirroring the way Dan is sat under the shower-head. “Dan, you need to—”

“It’s cold, Phil,” His teeth are chattering. White, white, white. “It’s t-too cold.”

“There’s not a lot of hot water,” Phil’s voice is orange. He reaches across and combs his hand through Dan’s hair as the water soaks the edges, streams across the mess and onto his fingers and Dan is still crying but it doesn’t mean anything when Phil utters, “Talk to me. What about Van Gogh?”

“He used to eat yellow paint,” Dan whimpers. “Yellow, Phil. Yellow like the sunshine and yellow like God and yellow like you.”

“I’m yellow?”

“Y-Yeah, Phil. You’re yellow. Delicate and safe and happy. Van Gogh would have liked you, Phil, h-he would have painted you with his yellow paint and—And he loved his brother so much. He l-loved France and loved art and his aliens—”

“Are yellow,” Phil whispers, for him. Dan is eighteen and he thinks he might reach to kiss him. “Right?”

“Right, Phil,” Dan nods, with cloudy eyes. Teeth and coke and milk. Cotton clouds and oxycontin. “Tell me about Doré now, Phil.”

“I don’t know if I can, Dan,” Phil says. “We’re running out of words now.”

There are bottles of shampoo and Phil’s got one in his hand and he puts some of the white on Dan’s hair and rubs it through the strands. His fingers are gentle, soft and tender and Dan’s crying but his heart is aching under the water and his husband’s touch. Three in the morning and rolling into his chest, lips grazing over his collarbone and eyelashes fluttering against his cheek and poppies and butterflies and _please, Phil, I love you._

Sheets damp with sweat and stomachs tugging under too-prominent ribcages.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Dan can’t write on an empty stomach but he says, “Please, tell me about Doré,” and Phil doesn’t look at him but something comes.

“Doré,” he mumbles, as he drags his fingers through Dan’s hair. Dan lets his eyes flutter and he swishes his hands through the cold water around him. “He was an illustrator, yeah? You know. He did the Bible and _The Raven_ —”

“By Edgar Allen Poe,” Dan’s voice is orange. Or maybe it’s yellow.

“Yeah,” Phil says quietly. He’s taken the shower-head and is holding his hand under it, like the water is too cold and it’s not good enough for Dan. For the psycho and the lunatic, the addict and the lover. “He did _Don Quixote_ , too.”

There’s such reluctance to his character, such hesitance but such softness and Dan wishes he was good enough at structural writing to form an accurate description of it. Because Phil Lester deserves it, he thinks. Phil Lester fucked a woman and got her pregnant and he drank so much, he made himself sick but he deserves the world. The world and everything around it because everything in it is not fucking good enough.

“Which one’s that, Phil?” Dan says to the foreign words.

“Spanish. You’ve probably read it at some point,” Phil mumbles. He brings the shower-head closer and says, “Lift your head back for me, okay?”

And Dan does as he’s told because he’s in love. He’s so fucking in love and he hates him so fucking much, but he doesn’t have the energy to push him away. It’s _fuck you, fuck you, love you_ but _I would die to taste your mouth on mine._

And they are so many metaphors and so many similes. So many misinterpreted connotations. They are the white of cocaine. Teeth and milk and morning skies. They are the taste of blood after a coughing fit and they are the hoarse voice after vomiting. The red in the previous sentence. The colour in the dramatic monologues. The subject and the authors, the mess and the creators and the romanticisation of a drug addiction in a toxic relationship.

_Fuck you, fuck you, love you._

They are the secularity of modern society and the nails in Lord Jesus’ hands.

Phil lets the water run down Dan’s hair and they forget Doré—feel him float down the plughole—and they forget their years. Eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth. Memories drained from syringes plunged into blue veins, forced out from under the skin and made into art. It’s all about that bathroom in Paris and all about what they need, what they want and what they don’t and there’s thunder jotted into the skyline when Dan writes that he leans forward with his arms reaching for Phil.

Hard weather.

Jesus Christ.

It always rains on Sunday.

“Don’t,” Phil manages, as the scraggly limbs come around his neck. He doesn’t move but he says it and Dan’s mind doesn’t know how to fucking leave the memory of Phil kissing him between his thighs alone.

“Please, Phil,” Dan whines. His arms trail water over Phil’s shirt. “What about _Don Quixote_? What about me and—You love me, Louis said. You love me but you never hold me and you never kiss me and—Why can’t you kiss me, Phil?”

“Dan,” Phil’s touch is gentle on the man. “Not now. Please, not now. We need to hurry up with this so you can change and I can book tickets home. And then everything will be as it should again.”

“No,” Dan starts shaking his head. He moves his hands and touches them over his stomach and it’s enough to rise nausea in his throat. Beautiful, ugly, nothing. Three, three, three. “I don’t want to go back, Phil, I want to stay here. I want to go to Arles. I want to find our yellow house and I want to be happy.”

“Nobody’s happy,” Phil says. “You know they’re not. People are content and that’s what we have to work for. So come on, let’s get out and let’s—”

“Phil,” Dan cries on his name, wet hands fishing his shirt and discolouring the fabric. He whispers, “I’m so ugly,” right from the back of his throat. Like he’s dug it up from somewhere he didn’t know he could reach.

“What?” Phil breathes, so close that Dan’s skin prickles.

“I don’t want you to look at me anymore,” he admits. Red and red and little fragments of yellow. “You think things about me. You hate me. Don’t look, Phil.”

“No, stop,” Phil slides his hand around the back of Dan’s neck and Dan leans over the tub to get to him. “You’re not ugly. You’re goddamn fucked up, but it doesn’t make you ugly. Everything is ugly, but you’re not. I wouldn’t have married you if you couldn’t do what you can.”

“What can I do, Phil?”

“Take ugly things and make them pretty. So pretty I forget they’re ugly, and I forget some people just don’t get it before I tell them,” Phil runs his thumb over Dan’s cheek and Dan nudges closer, brushes his mouth across the side of his jaw. Red. Grey. The Paris sky and sex on the tiles and sleeping in a double bed for the first time with nobody to curl into.

“You don’t love me to the moon and back, do you, Phil?” Dan’s terrified as he says the words into Phil’s skin. He wants to kiss him and he thinks he will, thinks he will so fucking hard, except—

“I’ll turn the water off and get you out now, you’ve had long enough. You’ll get too cold otherwise,” Phil reaches across and switches off the running water. Dan’s teeth are still chattering—white, white, white—and the little hairs on his skin are standing to attention. There’s a line of water running down the back of his neck, travelling over his spine and between his hips.

He’s shivering when Phil holds up a towel. He doesn’t know what colour it is and he doesn’t care for asking.

Phil probably wouldn’t tell him anyway.

“Can you climb out?” he tries to put his hand on Dan’s damp shoulder to guide him, but it’s not enough.

Recovery. Recovery. Soft and lovely, pretty and ugly and bleeding and hungry and Dan wonders what colour the sea would be if he didn’t already know.

“Lift me,” Dan trembles in the tub. “Please, Phil.”

Phil is still hesitant, but he nods his head. “Okay,” he mumbles, and hooks his hands back under Dan’s arms to lift him with minimal strain. He carefully places him on the tiles and wraps the warm towel around his body as the excess water drips onto the floor.

“Why don’t you believe in aliens, Phil?” Dan whispers. His voice is hoarse and sore. It’s still raining and he misses Louis.

“Same reason I don’t believe in God,” The man rubs the towel over Dan’s shoulders and all of his bones. Weak, pathetic.

Ugly.

Jesus died for his children and Dan wants to ask Phil if he would do the same for his child. For little bumps and tiny fingers.

“Why, Phil?”

“Because they don’t _exist_ , that’s why. Where are your fresh clothes?”

Nihilist narrators. Generic fucking bastards. There’s religion in everything and everything in religion.

“Why don’t you think they exist, Phil?” Dan says. He’s not looking at his stomach because it’s nothing and he wants something but he’s too frightened of what that means. He’s too frightened to look for the Xs on his wrists and too frightened of what they mean. They look like blood and feel like jagged edges and taste like antidepressants.

“Where the fuck are your clothes? Did you only bring a hoodie?” Phil demands.

“No, no, I want to wear my pyjamas,” Dan whines. He shuffles forward and takes them and hugs them to his chest and the cosmos is warm, safe. He’s an alien and he wants you to tell him what colour he is. “Please, Phil. Why don’t you believe in aliens? Why don’t you kiss me anymore?”

“Because I don’t—” Phil interrupts himself, hands dragging through his hair. There are stains from the bath water on his shirt, where Dan has touched him. ”I don’t want to fucking talk about this, Jesus Christ. I’m trying to stay calm because we don’t work otherwise but—Fuck, Dan, you’re such a mess and—Where are your clothes?”

“You think I’m ugly,” Dan scrunches his hands up around his pyjamas. His voice crumbles like it’s the stone of a statue and Phil’s words are shards of glass, carved onto the surface. Horrific sounds. Red nails. Big chalkboards. Grinding teeth.

“I don’t think you’re ugly. I told you, you’re not fucking ugly. Just please, Dan, please stop fucking shit up when I’ve made the decision to try.”

“You’re not trying,” Dan cries. “Fuck you, I hate you.”

Phil doesn’t flinch. It’s like going to war and wondering how the soldiers do it. “No, you don’t.”

“Do, too,” Dan brings his pyjamas to his face and buries his nose in them. “I want to wear them, Phil. Please. I want to be safe and happy and warm. And I want to love people like people were supposed to love me and I want to meet Van Gogh.”

“He’s dead,” Phil says. “Give me your pyjamas.”

Dan shakes his head and cradles them in his arms.

“Give them to me, Dan,” Phil’s close to him and he snatches the clothes from his arms, shakes them and starts redressing his husband. It’s the bottoms and then the shirt, and Phil’s hands are still cold when his knuckles brush against Dan’s chest.

“Can we see Louis, Phil? He’s going to take me to Arles, he told me.”

“He didn’t tell you that. He told me. And we can’t see him anymore,” Phil utters and his oceans are still, like they’re the picture in a painting when he drags his index down Dan’s stomach. Over the shape of his ribs, potholes and speed bumps and flaws in the craftwork. Dan wants to tell his father he’s sorry for the mess, but instead he says:

“Don’t look at me, Phil. You never used to like to look at me.”

“What?” Phil’s voice is a tangerine of sorts and his eyes bat up to Dan’s face. “I never said that. When did I—I never made you feel like that.”

“You hurt me, too,” Dan’s attention is still on the angularity of Phil’s face, on his sadness and his sorrow and his pity. His guilt. His anguish. His too much and too little, his drugs and his alcohol and _I’m sorry I didn’t love you better._ “You hurt me so much, Phil, and there’s blood everywhere now. Look at it. Can you see? All this red, all this pain. Anger and failure and—and sometimes I can’t remember why I hate you or why I always love you but I always do.”

“We did bad things, Dan,” Phil has stopped buttoning up Dan’s pyjamas to slide one arm around his hips. And it’s like that time Dan kept saying _that time_ like he was too much of a shitty writer to vary his sentence starters and his depictions of awful memories. Too much of a shitty writer to understand that the art isn’t in the creation, it’s in the interpretation. Because nobody gives a fuck about it but if you tell them they don’t, then they probably will. They probably do.

Phil says, “We took bad things and we said bad things and we did bad things. We were bad people.”

“But not anymore,” Dan wipes his nose on his sleeve. It’s home, it’s easy. It’s dirty, but if the world can sit around while a kid shoots heroin into his veins then it can do the same as he wipes his nose on his shirt and it can be fucking quiet about it. “We’re not bad anymore. Right, Phil? Tell me, Phil.”

“No, Dan,” Phil whispers. He’s got his palm pressed against his bare stomach now, hand under the fabric. “We’re not anything anymore. Not ugly, not pretty. Not bad and not good and not happy. Not sad and not content and not artists or geniuses or people who think they can make other people think and get paid for it. We’re not fucking idiots but we’re not fucking intelligent and we’re not fucking broken. We’re not fucking married, not fucking divorced. We’re nothing, don’t you see? We had to be something to then become nothing and—”

“I’m a psychopath.”

“You’re not,” Phil slides his hand around Dan’s back and the touch is ecstasy, but Dan’s been high enough times to know what’s good and what isn’t, what he’d take again and what he wouldn’t. He thinks his husband is both and he’s confused. “You’re nothing and so am I. And so is Louis and so is Ella and so is my kid, whatever the fuck it will be. Whatever the fuck I will make of what I get, I will continue to be nothing because I’ve never really had anything and maybe it’s not my place to say whether that’s okay.”

And Dan is in love with him because he talks like he does. He is in love with him because he makes words sound like therapy, like each little syllable is sewn with and sold with _get well soon._ And each little break of thought between the sentences illustrates them as parenthesis, as shit the world would make sense without because they’re nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing to depend on and nothing to believe in and nothing to look forward to because they begin the same time they end and they end the same time they begin again. And their love is the yellow house and the Garden of Eden but it’s nothing when considered and nothing when not. It’s juxtapositions that make little to no sense and they’re standing together in the bathroom with their hearts scuffed and bruised like the shoes they strung up outside of their flat. Laces and tightropes and puppet strings to swing and bring to anything moderately taxing. They are golden wedding rings and teeth marks in children’s arms and the white of the haziest morning and the black of the darkest night. They are the _and_ you’ve heard too often and the guilt you’ve felt too much and they wish they could be something more than nothing but nothing is all they’ve got.

They ate from the tree of knowledge and fucked up the system, fucked up the story, just because they thought they could make it work. But all they are is a work in progress people forgot were progressing and they’re working at remembering the people that forgot. The words that the plughole regurgitated for memory and the mistakes that defined them without ever making any and Dan would fucking pray for someone to listen but he knows he doesn’t deserve it. He ate from the knowledge he was told he never could because he thought he could use his teeth to work happiness out of linguistics and language out of emotion but it didn’t taste so good going down.

And now he’s vomited it back up a thousand times over but God doesn’t fucking care.

A mistake is a mistake.

A spade is a spade.

A colour is a colour and a man is a character.

“I’m sorry for doing it,” Dan says, when his shirt is back on and he’s crying over his sleeves. “I didn’t mean to.”

“What?” Phil manages. He’s holding the wet towel and trying not to cry. “You didn’t do anything, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t think I’m very well,” he chokes. “C-Can’t remember why. Can’t remember all the things I-I’ve done and all the things we said. What’s _Don Quixote_ , Phil? What does it mean?”

And sometimes there’s no happiness even if there’s no sadness because sometimes you can be something and not be able to explain it. And sometimes the world spins the right way, but it spins like it’s trying too hard to get into Dan’s writing and—

And he doesn’t fucking eat because he’s not very well and his words are so painful that they’ll never fucking sell but if he died, they’d regret it. They’d know it and they’d love it. He’d be the starry night over the rhône and the man in the asylum that painted the yellow and painted the prisoners.

“Until death it is all life,” Phil says, and literature is genius. “That’s what it means, Dan.”

“Until death it is all life,” Dan echoes, with a voice numbed down by a million tears and a million attempts at selling them. “I’m so t-tired, Phil. I’m so tired and I’m so sad.”

“Sad,” Phil’s close to him again, breathing the word across his nose. It tastes like it used to when they slept in separate beds. “I think we need to go home.”

“But I don’t remember where it is, Phil,” Dan cries. “I don’t remember why I lost it a-and why I want to go back and whether you’re going to be there or not.”

“I am,” Phil says, wrapping his arms around the lunatic against him. Addicts, narcotics. Mood swings told through word stings. “I will be. Stop talking now, put your hoodie on.”

And when he pulls it over Dan’s head for him, his hair grows all ruffled and messy and sad. Grows confusing and wild and other lists of adjectives.

“I w-want to talk to Louis, Phil,” Dan sobs, with his hands clinging to Phil’s body. _Let me stay here, let me let you love me._ “Can we stay for a li-little longer? Please, Phil, please can we stay and—”

“We can’t stay for any longer than another twenty-four hours,” Phil whispers, right down into Dan’s ear. He’s standing rigid and reluctant but his eyes say _we’re eight chapters in, can’t kiss you yet_ and Dan’s got a ring on his finger over a zero and a nine.

“Just that long then, Phil,” he pleads. “So I can say g-goodbye to Louis. Louis and his aliens.”

“Okay,” Phil’s chest heaves on a sigh. “Okay, then.”

And then they’re standing there motionless, holding up the plot. Phil’s got his arms around the shaking man like he’s trying to protect him from the shit he let murder his confidence and slaughter his memory. Phil Lester feels the world spin too fast for Dan Howell and he holds him tight, stabling him, like their relationships has ever been something to fucking rely on. But until death it is all life and until life it is all death and the art of realism is the reality of art.

Honest and true.

Sad and confused.

Dan says, “I love you.”

And Phil says, “You used to.”

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Dan would pray for the ugly.

Dan would pray for the children and Dan would pray for the theatre and Dan would pray for—

“All the world’s a stage.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how I managed to write the longest chapter so far and it’s literally a single scene. I hope you enjoyed it, let me know what you thought <3


	9. Tusk

**number nine: tusk**

_When_ they meet Louis at a café later, it’s dark out. Night. There’s a blackness to the Paris streets that Dan isn’t sure of, doesn’t think he likes, and he wonders if the sun’s shine in Arles ever fades to even half the extent.

The café isn’t a whole lot like the one in London. It’s thinner, lighting stronger. There are shadows around the tables and shadows on the walls and Louis’ is sitting alone on the outdoor seats when they arrive. Dan staggering like a maniac and Phil wandering at his side, with his own spin on moderate awareness.

The strangers would never know he’s a recovering alcoholic. They’d say _good job_ if they did, give him a pat on the back or some shit. But they’d say nothing to Dan because Dan’s recovery gives only half the deal. It’s help, but it’s an addiction. Another one in itself.

“There he is,” Dan’s heart peaks at the sight of Louis and the strain on his chest is a burning sensation. Like the yellow of sunshine and the orange of patience. “Louis—Hi, Louis. Hi.”

“Hey there, buddy,” Louis’ attention was on the soft drum of his feet but now it’s on the man in the pyjamas and he gets up to greet him with etiquette, but Dan just merges himself into his side.

Because a greeting to a lonely soul is a hug with both arms, no matter how strong. And a hug with a tight grip, no matter how unwell and how hard it is on your symptoms. Sticky-out bones like sheets of paper in exercise books and Louis squeezes him and it hurts but it’s a compromising pain. It hurts but it would hurt more if he didn’t do it because Louis is the sky when it’s demure with orange. Placid and forgiving.

It’s not raining anymore, but the sunset reflects into the puddles down the street.

Dan wishes he was seven and his mother was here to take him through them.

”How’re you doing? Did you miss me today?” Louis helps Dan down onto a chair, with careful hands on his arms. Phil sits down opposite maybe, but Dan isn’t sure.

Orange, orange, orange.

“I missed you, Louis,” Dan nods. “I missed you a lot and I watched the rain and I spoke to the sky. I told it about you and I told the grey I missed the orange and—Your aliens are orange, Louis. I told Phil that.”

“Yeah?” Louis smiles. Kind. “That’s nice, buddy. Did you—You didn’t smoke anymore, no?”

“No, Louis—Louis, I wish I could. Do you have any cigarettes?” Dan looks between the men and they’re staring at him and the air in Paris is cool. They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“Not right now, buddy,” Louis says. “Some other time, maybe. Okay?”

“Okay, Louis,” Dan starts drumming his fingers against the surface of the table. Over and over and over. One, two, three. He counts the heads on the chairs and studies the colours of the eyes and his mind runs through it with a pace its accustomed to, quick and frantic and Doré and Van Gogh and—

“Louis,” he blurts. “You said you’d take me to Arles. You said you’d take me with Phil and—and Phil loves me, Louis, he told me he loved me.”

Louis glances to the man with the black hair. His skin is pale and washed out. Acrylics. He gives a little shake of his head and it says _I didn’t, I don’t._

Nobody gives a fuck.

“You did, Phil,” Dan can’t remember anything. They had sex on the tiles and he can’t remember if Phil tasted of vodka or red wine, white or red or if it felt nice or if it felt gentle or if the world was spinning at the right pace. “You told me you love me. Don’t you love me?”

“We can’t go to Arles,” Phil says, instead. Because it’s easier, probably. Because it’s better than _no, not anymore._

Dan thinks about his hand on his stomach.

“I said, I can take you,” Louis tells Phil. “Both of you. I have a friend that lives there and it doesn’t take long. We can go on the train and we can—”

“Yeah, Louis,” Dan interrupts with his fingers drumming quicker against the table. Manchester Station. A quatrain and a weak stomach and kiss on the cheek, a _you look lovely_ and a less painful hug with less prominent bones.

Eighteen.

Beautiful.

“ _No_ , Louis,” Phil challenges. He’s staring at him, hard and stern and he’s trying to pour the grey of thunderstorms over the orange of sunsets and Dan doesn’t like the shade it makes. “We’ve been over this and we argued it out. We’re not running away anywhere else. Our lives are in London.”

“He wants to go, Phil,” Louis is calm, always so calm. A young couple clatter past the tables on the street-space and they’re staring at Dan. Aliens. Galaxies. Days that look like Mars if it were broken up and the earth is in Phil Lester’s eyes if you look hard enough. Seventy percent ocean. “I just think it would be good for him. It’d make him happy, keep him calm.”

“I’m sorry, Louis, I forgot we _give_ the psycho what he wants—”

“Don’t call him that, Phil,” Louis sighs. “Jesus, I thought—”

“I’m not a psycho, you told me I’m not,” Dan doesn’t know if they hear him or know if they’re listening because his voice comes like the track under a running train.

“You said you were going to try and work with it and understand it,” Louis is still talking and Phil is still listening, still ignoring, so Dan kicks him under the table.

Hard. Red. Scarred knuckles and angry eyes and lips bloody from cut-up fists. _Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._ Pale fingers clenching around collars and acts of rage and self-defence, shoving hurting chests like you have a right to destroy what’s left. You have a right to make it worse. And _we just need some fucking money_ and stains of substance abuse, stains of violent parents and _don’t touch me, don’t come near me, I hate you._

”Dan,” Phil’s rubbing the side of his leg with a jaw clenched tight. “Fuck you, why the hell did you kick me? Why do you—It’s not okay to do that.”

Dan’s agony is channeled through irritation that he can never articulate very accurately. “I want you to listen to me, I want you to take me to _Arles_ —”

“We’re _not_ going to Arles,” Phil snaps. “We’re not going to fucking Arles. We’re going home, we’re going back where we belong.”

“I belong in France,” Dan says, but he doesn’t think it’s true. Doesn’t think it’s what he means. Because what he means is _I belong in the sky_ and _I belong in space._ He means to say that he belongs with aliens and friends, Van Gogh’s paint and Lord Jesus’ arms and a place with paved roads to wander across the orange of the sunset. He belongs in the ocean, splashing between the waves and paddling his feet and collecting shells down by the tide. Ice-cream trucks. Tracks in the sand. Pebbles in his hand to drop in his bucket, to give to his mother because he knew it made her happy. And he belongs in the moments she smiled like she loved him and the moments his father put his hand on her hip. The moments in the kitchen, the moments down the hall. The _I love you_ and _see you later_ , the little touches and stabilisers and loose bedroom doors.

Floral dresses.

Gentle perfumes.

Dan belongs in the days his parents were in love. But he belongs with their pain and their heartache too, with their palms over angry cheeks and their phone calls to the police and their too little, too much, not enough. Their sons. Their shines. Their shadows and their fights and their open backdoors, mowers on lawns and cold drinks on warm throats. He belongs in the garden he first learned to ride a bike and he belongs with his grandfather because maybe he never got to say goodbye. He belongs with the card games and the cheated-rounds of chess, the cartoons on Saturday morning and the records in the player and the music, the moment, the forgotten and the noticed. The pieces of childhood they cast as irrelevant, like the way it feels to get a certificate for playing an instrument and the way it feels to drive the distance for hot chocolate on Christmas Eve.

A father who bothers, a father who matters. Your drawings of him with red lines crossing through his figure, as if it’s a way to say _fuck you_ when you’re eight years old.

But now Dan is thirty something—maybe, probably—and there are no sheets of paper and no red crayons and no naivety to conflict with. He’s armed with agony, failure and guilt and he injected drugs in doorways and bled his teenage lover dry and his words say that he’s a thousand hits past giving a fuck what his parents think. They say he wishes he’d have done shit different and they say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“No, Louis, fuck off,” Phil’s still arguing, still angry and still enraged. “You can’t take him to Arles, this can’t be made about what he wants. If Dan got what he wanted, there’d be a psych hospital on every corner because the world would have read his stories and lost their mind over them and—”

“They’re good, Phil,” Dan says. “You used to tell me. They’re good. They make you think, they make you sad.”

“And nobody wants to read sad shit, Dan, we’re not going over this right now.”

“Your book made me sad,” Louis notes, eyes on the man with no ring. No zero, no nine. He probably doesn’t remember Manchester Station and he probably doesn’t remember the print on the shirt he was wearing. “Sometimes art is sad, Phil. Sometimes it’s art because it’s sad.”

Phil stares at Louis. “Of course it is. But there’s sad and then there’s crippling depression and Dan doesn’t realise that novels are supposed to entertain, not to give you the second thing.”

“No,” Dan’s voice is distant but they’re both looking at him. “There’s crippling depression and then there’s therapy. You’re just someone who doesn’t have to use words to save their life. It’s like taking heroin for the fun of it, rather than for the addiction. So fuck you, Phil. Fuck you for not getting it, and fuck you for pretending that you do.”

And Louis is watching Dan like it’s the most coherent thing he’s heard him say and Phil is watching Dan like he hates him and he loves him and he wishes they’d do a better job at understanding themselves. He’s watching him like he doesn’t remember the days they had dinner with his parents and he reached across to squeeze his knee under the table. The days with nervous hugs and shaking fingers, desperate for something to hold on to and the days with too much, too little, just enough.

“I bet you write cracking stories, Dan,” Louis says, and he puts a calm hand on the man’s bony shoulder.

“I don’t show them people anymore, Louis,” Dan tells him. “They’re not good enough, they say. They don’t mean anything anymore. Van Gogh ate yellow paint but Phil says he didn’t.”

“Well,” Louis pauses. There’s a shrug in his voice. “You think what you want, buddy. He can, too. He was an artist, but he was sad. Not well.”

“Do you think inanity is genius, Louis?” Dan says, and he’s sure he’s said it before. Twenty something. His manuscript in Phil’s hands. Careful blue eyes and a surprised kind-of pride and _yeah, babe, the greatest artists are—_

“—the ones who drive themselves mad,” Phil is mumbling it under his breath. He remembers, Dan thinks. He remembers, he remembers. One, two, three.

“Every genius is always slightly mad,” Louis says. It doesn’t sound the same as Phil and Dan doesn’t care for it half as much. He doesn’t care for anything half as much as he does for his husband’s words, even if they’re not sad and even if they’re entertainment and even if they’re just another of the million copies of falsity stacked on the shelves. He’ll read them, learn them. Love them and inject them and let them dissolve on his tongue like that metaphor all the poets say.

“I’m not a genius though, Louis,” Dan says. “Nobody cares for what I have to say.”

“I care,” Louis nods. “And Phil cares. And even if we didn’t, why would that matter?”

And Dan wants to say _because I can’t afford a loaf of fucking bread._ He wants to say that he stored money in his glovebox so he wouldn’t spend it on drugs and he can’t afford the letters of _rehab_ anymore than he can _cocaine._ They say words earn you cash if you use them correctly and Dan failed English and they didn’t want his story. Didn’t want his mess. So he earns no cash and he sits there bleeding, writing about feelings and screaming at the ceiling and they never asked for a meaning, never asked for an explanation. He’s tried a million times to sell a million copies of sadness but they’re “not interested in melancholy through metatheatre” and they’re “not interested in _where the fuck were you when I needed you?_ ” because it’s too much, too heavy.

He needs to learn how to stop.

“Arles,” he says, and he might be crying. Might be smiling. There’s cigarette smoke, thick in the air. “I want to go to Arles with you, Louis.”

“We’re getting the first flight back to London tomorrow,” Phil tells him.

“No, Phil,” Dan’s chest pulls tight. Acrobats on tightropes, fingers around strings. Circus acts. Stomach pains. “Please, Phil, don’t—Don’t make me go back there. I want to stay with Louis, with Van Gogh and the sunset and the bed at the hotel.”

“I think I’ll go and order some drinks,” Louis stands from the table. The sunset. The aliens. The orange. “What do you want, Phil? What shall I get him?”

“Vodka,” Phil says. Quick, sudden. It’s awful in his voice and sounds like the music, the moment, the forgotten and the noticed. Dan thinks about hiding bottles in the bottom of his closet and holding Phil’s face in his hands, smearing _get better, get better, get better, I love you_ along the shape of his lips. Cold and frightened, slumped against his chest. Blood soaked in liquor and drinking on an empty stomach.

“That’s a good idea?” Louis questions him.

“You asked me what I wanted, there you have it. Dan’ll have what he can handle.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means he’ll have a bottle of water,” Phil leans back slightly on his chair and stares out at the street and Louis heads inside, so Dan watches his husband. He looks different with the lights tumbling in over his face, the contrast of them against his skin. Dan tries to think of a colour to define him with—to mould him with so he’s better understood—but he can’t think of anything. He’s not grey, he’s not blue. He’s not yellow because he’s not happy and he’s not orange because he’s not kind. Dan considers green but he doesn’t know what that means yet. He considers pink but it makes him think too hard about bubblegum and strawberry milk, about kissing Phil with cherry on his tongue. About wearing pink hoodies and tasting pink goods and painting his nails like the colour will save him. No Van Gogh, no yellow or Louis. No orange, no blue.

Just pink at one and pink at two and pink at three. Caking icing, marshmallows. Dan’s stomach is grumbling but pink is safe.

It’ll keep him safe.

“Phil,” he says softly, and Phil looks at him.

“What?”

“You know if you _did_ believe in aliens,” The cosmos is bleeding onto his skin. “What colour would they be?”

Phil turns back away. “I don’t know, Dan.”

“You must do.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Are they orange, like Louis’?”

“No. Drop it.”

Dan plays with the buttons on his pyjamas. “Are they green? Nobody ever talks about green, I don’t know what green means. Can you tell me about _Don Quixote_?”

“No,” Phil says, cold. “Just sit there quietly, for the love of God.”

“Please, Phil,” Dan leans forward and his fingers start drumming on the glass of the table again. Over and over. There’s a hum in the back of his throat, warm and gentle on the scratched surface. It’s pink like the days Phil kissed his thin fingers. “I want to talk about it, I want to talk about it with you. You told me you loved me.”

“No, I didn’t,” Phil snaps. “I never said that. Stop saying I did. I never said it because I don’t anymore and lying to you is not the way through this.”

“Through, what?” Dan asks. His voice is little and frightened.

Phil shakes his head. “Shut up.”

And then he’s red, Dan thinks, more than he’s ever been pink. He’s the taste of failure, the bitterness of rejection. No money, no sales. He’s the colour Dan wishes he didn’t know so well, the colour his parents painted their walls and the colour of the day his grandfather died and the colour of the names they called him at school. The colour of _grow up._ The colour of _I hate you._ The colour of divorce and the colour of minimal wage, the wine on your throat and the pain in your tummy and the lack of words to form a story that they’d quite like to publish.

Dan’s days are measured in colours. Good days, bad. And he wonders if Louis is orange even through his guilt and his pain and he wonders if Van Gogh ever hated the shade of yellow. If the world span at the right pace then, back when he was alive. And if they knew he ate paint because he wanted to be happy, if they knew he ate paint because it was delicate and it was art.

Dan wonders what the world would be if Van Gogh hadn’t lived. And then he wonders what the world would be if Van Gogh hadn’t died. He wonders if he chose a star and headed straight towards it, he’d find him painting his sunflowers for Gauguin and smearing yellow across his hands and resting the edges of his paintbrush on the tip of his tongue.

Dan wonders if he told Phil he wanted to die, he’d write him a way out of this.

Like the ink in the end of his pen measures each stutter of his heart, measures the first and the last and the time between the two. And Dan considers why Phil doesn’t believe in aliens before remembering he doesn’t believe in God, and he doesn’t believe in God because he doesn’t exist. And writing is shit like that, he thinks. Because sometimes it flows and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes you can manipulate a sentence so that people believe in Jesus and they start praying for the people they don’t know but sometimes the words just don’t come out right. 

Sometimes there isn’t enough poetry, sometimes there isn’t enough blood.

Dan writes _it hurts_ and hopes they get something out of it. Because it hurts like nobody noticing that you said something and it hurts like knowing you should but never do and it hurts like repetition, hurts like addiction. Hurts like sitting at a café terrace at night, space pyjamas and relapsing alcoholics and children on the way.

“Why are you crying, Mr?”

Dan’s heart is gentle and Dan’s heart is kind. It’s laying slaughtered in his chest but Van Gogh painted it yellow—yellow to drown the red—and it hears a tiny voice and reaches for it, cradles it.

There’s a small boy standing at the end of the table, tugging on his sleeve.

“Hello,” Dan sniffs. He’s crying because Phil doesn’t believe in God, or some shit. “Hello, little boy. Hello.”

“Why are you crying?” The boy asks, peering up at his face. “You shouldn’t cry, nothing is worth crying. That’s what my Mama says.”

“Do you believe in aliens?” Dan wonders if the boy will be his friend. He thinks he’s orange maybe, thinks he’s perfect under the sunset. He hopes his parents are good to him and he hopes they read him bedtime stories. He hopes they teach him it’s okay to be scared, it’s okay to be in love. It’s okay to not know what you want from what you want and it’s okay if you need help, every now and then. He hopes they teach him to think hard about what other people disregard and they teach him to study Monet, Doré and Van Gogh. They teach him the art of realism and the realism of art, the awareness in romanticism and Romeo’s Juliet. Dante’s _Inferno._ Dumas’ Musketeers. The fact that things work well if you make them fucking work and that addiction is yours truly, if you play your cards right.

Dan hopes they teach him that fiction is a realist’s tool and art is something to be appreciated, no less than it is to be created.

“Yeah, Mr,” The little boy says. “I believe in aliens.”

“You believe in aliens,” Dan nods, soft and echoing. He’s still crying and he thinks his nails are pink. “What colour are your aliens?”

“Uh—Well, I think—Green, I suppose,” The boy answers. “Green like my Mama’s favourite dress. What colour are your aliens, Mr?”

“My aliens,” Dan’s heart starts pumping quickly. Aliens. Aliens. He opens his palm and half expects to see one sitting in there, like he’s holding the cosmos in his hand. “I don’t know my aliens. I don’t know them yet. I can’t remember what they look like but—but Van Gogh’s are yellow. Do you know Van Gogh?”

The boy is frowning. “Think so. Was he that artist?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dan beams. “He ate yellow paint.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, that’s strange. Why would he want to do that?”

“It made him happy. It made him real happy, happier than anything else.”

“The colour yellow?”

Dan is nodding.

“Well,” The boy says. He touches a star on Dan’s pyjamas. “Did it kill him?”

Dan flinches, and the boy retracts his hand. “Yellow paint. Yellow paint? The yellow paint didn’t kill him, it made him happy.”

“But wouldn’t it have hurt him, Mr?”

“I don’t know,” Dan whispers. It’s strained in his sore throat and he thinks about his fingers pushing there, forcing the food out of his system. “It made him happy. It didn’t matter to him, it made him happy. What’s your name? I’m Dan.”

And Dan thinks about clattering with his friends up the street, his shitty trainers on his bike peddles and his card games with his grandfather and _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t attend the funeral._ Selfish fucking bastard. Coffins and bags of weed, white flakes down his throat and sniffs of oxy—

—cotton.

Cotton candy. 

Pink like his husband in the days they were in love. He lets his mind soak it all up and colour in the black of funeral dresses, of the insides of writers who put their thumbs in their mouths after scribbling forty thousand words in need of a psychoanalysis report. 

“I’m Theo. Eight and three quarters,” The boy tells him. Eight. Eight months without talking, eight months without drugs. Clean. Clean. “I like your pyjamas.”

“This is Phil,” Dan has been staring at his husband and the name just comes. Just pours out of his throat, spills down his chin. “We’re married but he doesn’t love me and he thinks I’m losing my mind.“

“Hi, Phil,” Theo waves. He looks back at Dan. “You married him. He’s a man and you’re a man, but he doesn’t love you anymore. Why not, Phil?”

Phil doesn’t answer him.

Selfish fucking bastard.

“Can we talk about Van Gogh, Theo?” Dan asks him. He takes one of the little boy’s hands in his larger ones and smiles. “You can touch my pyjamas, if you want to. The galaxies are bigger on my shoulders.”

Theo puts his hand on Dan’s left shoulder and Dan realises he has green eyes.

Theo. Green.

Something tells him he makes no sense and he wants to say _fuck you, don’t you think I fucking know?_ He wants to tell the voice that it doesn’t mean anything to him, that it’s just something he can go about like it’s inspiration in itself. He wants to tell the voice that he can’t remember the colour of his mother’s eyes or if his father would know if he gave him a call. He wants to tell the voice to fuck off because it didn’t see the pain, it didn’t see blood and heroin and stacks of murky pages. It didn’t see bottles of alcohol. It didn’t see bones in the bathroom. It doesn’t know why he’s hurting and it doesn’t know why he’s rhyming. He’s using cutlery on words so they’re small enough to eat, and he can regurgitate his vocabulary and they can call him suicidal.

Call him a psycho.

Call him a mess.

He says _I used to put blades to my wrists so I’d say ugly things._ And he says _I’m a mess but I use these words to save my own life_ and he knows they don’t get it, he knows they don’t get him. He knows he’s suicidal. He knows he’s a psycho.

But he wouldn’t be able to do it if he didn’t want to die.

He wouldn’t be able to do it if he wasn’t telling lies.

And, “You look real sad, Dan, why are you so sad?”

Dan isn’t looking at the child when he says, “Hell if I know. Do you believe in God, tiny boy?”

“Yeah, Dan. Yeah, I believe in God,” Theo tells him. “God and aliens. Why don’t you?”

“Because—” Dan doesn’t know what to say. Aliens. Aliens. Louis is buying vodka for a recovering alcohol and kids are starving in their mothers’ fucking arms. Babies are dying, adults are crying. There’s a boy fighting in the war and a girl with her father’s hands on her when he considers why he doesn’t believe in God. When he considers if he did five minutes ago and he considers if he would, should his grandfather have made it out alive.

Should his mother have not taken those pills.

Should his husband have not just ordered vodka.

Should his writing not sound like a nihilist on crack.

“Because I don’t believe in anything that asks me to believe in it,” Dan eventually says. “And God keeps asking me to, Theo. But I don’t know whether he likes me or not.”

“God?”

“Yeah, Theo. God.”

“He’s lovely, Dan,” Theo says. He’s still got his hand on his shoulder. “God is lovely.”

“Is he orange?”

“Orange? Well, I don’t know.”

“Do you think he likes me?”

Theo nods. “Sure, Dan. God likes everyone.”

“Apart from me. Apart from me, Theo, because I’m not very well.”

Theo frowns at him as he gently pushes him away and brings his knees up on the chair, pulling them to his chest.

“Why are you not very well? Do you have a temperature, shall I see?” Theo steps forward again, and Dan feels his tiny hand on his forehead. “You don’t, Dan, you’re really cold. You’re really cold and really thin, do you want something to eat?”

“No, Theo,” Dan starts shaking his head at the suggestion. He buries his face in his knees and the bones are against his eyelids. The voice laying somewhere around the area of his frontal lobe starts muttering the word _eat_ like it’s fucking getting off on it. Like it wants Dan to do it. Like it wants him to cry and it wants him scream and it wants him to put his fingers down his throat. Dan is terrified of what it wants, terrified of what it is, and he’s terrified of Theo.

Terrified of himself.

“Where are your parents, little one?” Phil is suddenly talking and glancing around the outside space.

And Dan doesn’t care for anything but the sound of his own head because he’s selfish like that, he’s a wreck like that. He’s frightened of little boys with angels in their eyes and he’s frightened of his husband because he isn’t wearing his ring.

Dan doesn’t understand the colour green yet, and he’s too sad to try and make it happy. He’s too sad to remember what his meds tasted like and whether Louis was there when he popped them. He’s too sad to remember why his mother was so numb and why his father never came home and why everything just sounds wrong, everything just doesn’t feel right.

Everything is too little and everything is too much and everything is just not quite _enough._

He says, “Phil, I want to go home,” and he’s crying.

“What?” Phil’s standing with his hands on Theo’s shoulders. “Dan, why are you crying? Jesus Christ, I can’t—I need to find his parents.”

“No, Phil,” Dan staggers to his feet and tries to force himself into Phil’s chest, skinny waist sliding beside Theo and weakly pushing him away. He grips onto Phil’s shirt and holds him tight. “Don’t leave me, don’t l-leave me—I want to go home, Phil, please can we—”

“Just fucking come inside a minute, just—just shut up and come inside,” And Phil’s got an arm around Theo and an arm around Dan and he’s dragging two kids into a dimly-lit café, dragging them with a heart inked with all the words in his novel. Space. Children. Colours and fragments of a love long forgotten, a love left behind.

They had sex on the tiles with vodka on their tongues and Dan never washed his mug up in the motherfucking sink. It’s still resting there, still waiting.

Theo believes in God but Dan doesn’t think he’d like him.

He says prayers for all the wrong things and he mocks metal crosses, mocks Jesus Christ. He uses the nails in hands for metaphors in his work and he calls himself Adam, on the eve of a divorce. He channels religion through poetry like it’s a piece of fucking art, like it’s wrong and it’s right and it doesn’t make any sense. Like it’s his to fuck around with, it’s his to make bleed.

He’s a nihilist narrator and God doesn’t like him.

Generic.

Boring.

He’ll die alone anyway.

“I’m sorry, he’s such a nuisance,” A strange woman is standing before Dan with her hair like his mother’s. Her nails are all red. She’s wearing a green dress. He shuffles into Phil, trembles under his arm and says, “N-No, Phil, don’t let her get me—”

“Shush, Dan,” Phil urges, and says something to the woman.

_Shush, Dan. Shut up._

_Nobody wants to hear it._

So he’s writing in private and he’s writing alone. He’s typing the word _fat_ on a computer screen and they’re screaming it down the hall, breathing it in his ear and injecting it in his head. A poke at his stomach, a pull on his wrist. A shudder of pain from the contact with his sleeve and too-numb pharmaceuticals, too many packets of cigarettes. Theo and Xanax, Prozac and Doré and Xs on his wrists over the blue of his veins.

There’s no blue without yellow, no yellow without blue.

They say _you shouldn’t write when you’re numb_ and Dan knows he agrees, knows he should stop. But his words chug out like his husband’s alcohol he poured down the drain, like he took from his hands and took from his addiction and _I’m trying to help you, I’m trying to help you._

If God liked Dan, he’d have fallen in love with a woman.

And if God liked Dan, he’d have been there to wish his grandfather goodbye. He’d have been good at mathematics, better at being clean. He’d be able to say things and mean them, he’d be happy and he’d make money and he’d be prouder of his ninth chapter.

But it’s all just such a mess. Nobody would care if he died, and it’s all just such a mess. God doesn’t like him and Theo is too kind and yellow paint killed Van Gogh and it’s all just such a fucking mess.

He’s crying in Phil’s arms in the middle of the café. Phil’s telling him to shut up because people are looking but he doesn’t make his mother happy anymore and he doesn’t like the way Jesus Christ treats him. He’s never going to go to Arles and he’s never going to look at his stomach and he’s never going to be able to convince them that he could change the fucking world.

“I-I’m sorry, Phil, really I am,” Dan turns away and starts sobbing into his hands. The cosmos is there, sitting in his palm. “Y-You don’t love me and I’m sorry and I w-wish I didn’t love you—”

“Dan, please, just stop,” Phil runs his hands over his hair. “Everybody’s looking at you, just come with me to find Louis and we can—”

“I-I’m trying to get better, Phil,” Dan chokes. “I’m trying but I don’t know w-what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing, there’s nothing,” Phil hooks an arm around Dan’s tiny body and Theo is gone. No God, no Jesus. Dan wishes he could make himself bleed. “You just need to calm down, you need to focus on your breathing and you need to calm down and—”

“Phil?” Louis’ voice is orange on Dan’s red ears. He thinks about his school jumpers, thinks about his brother’s number. He didn’t attend his grandfather’s funeral and nobody would attend his. “What’s wrong with him? What did you do?”

“Nothing, Louis, fuck off,” Phil snaps. “We don’t need you, he doesn’t want you—I need to take him home.”

And he starts moving Dan through the restaurant, shifting him past the tables. Dan sees a baby through the clouds but there’s no sky in his cardigan. No blue, no creation.

“Home? What do you mean, home? Where are you going, Phil?”

“D-Don’t touch me,” Dan thrashes his husband’s hands away, but Phil keeps pushing him. Over and over, no little or no more. Blood stains on white sleeves, cut-up fists and broken ribs and _I hate you, I hate you, I wish I’d never met you._

A punch in the gut.

A kick in the teeth.

They stagger out onto the street and Louis is still following, with the drinks in his hands.

“ _Phil_ , my God,” he’s cursing him out. “What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck is the matter? Why is he crying, who was that kid?”

“God d-doesn’t like me, Louis,” Dan is crying out the words and he feels his feet tumble off the edge of the curb, feels his toes touch the road and Phil grabs his arm roughly.

“Stop it,” he seethes. Red, red, red. “Fucking stop it right now, do you hear me? Look at me, you’re gonna get yourself killed—”

“I want to die, P-Phil, I want to—”

“What?” Phil slips his hands around his face, drags his fingers up the back of his hair and his eyes say _no, baby, not when we can still write_. His eyes are the days he’d take a bullet for Dan, the days he’d carry him to bed and kiss away the fear and read him the words he’d written for himself. They’re pink on the street and so fucking in love and Louis doesn’t get it, he doesn’t get it all. “Dan, don’t say that. Why would you say that? Fuck you, you don’t want to die. Look at me. You don’t want to die.”

“I w-want to die,” he says again. He’s suffocating on his pain. He belongs in the garden he first learned to ride a bike, he belongs with the cartoons and he belongs with his husband in their little flat in the city. Alcoholics and lunatics and pharmaceutical-addicts. Van Gogh’s paintings, stuck to their walls. Antiseptics through linguistics, touching pages against wounds where they’ve sliced their skin.

“You don’t want to die,” Phil used to sleep with pink elephants. “Dan, fuck. Say it. Tell me you don’t want to die, tell me—”

“Phil, he doesn’t want you to be close to him—” Louis tries.

“Fuck off, Louis, I won’t tell you again. Fuck off and never come back,” Phil turns on an angry breath, red the moment he looks away from Dan. _Love you, love you, love you._ Dan tries to shuffle back into the road, but Phil’s fingers are clenched tight on his pyjamas. “You know _nothing_ about him, you know _nothing_ about us and—”

“My mother was sick too, Phil,” Louis says. Dan thinks the orange is fading, God pouring black paint across the sky. Funerals. Liquorice, sweets roots and strings to wrap tight around throats. “She was sick and she needed help and I’d do anything to go back and treat her right, make her better—”

“Dan isn’t your fucking mother,” Phil spits at him. Dan’s still trying to thrash him away. “You’ve got no fucking right to tell me what to do with him, to throw your bullshit at me like you know what you’re doing—”

“Oh, sorry, Phil, so do _you_ know what you’re doing?”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Phil yanks Dan’s shirt when he moves into Louis’ face and the man with the ring tries to catch his breath on the breezes of agony. Paint palettes, fingers past tongues. Dan can’t fucking breathe and there’s no blue without yellow, no noise without silence and no madness without genius and _don’t touch me, don’t come near me, I hate you._. Green for Theo, orange for Louis.

Red for a fight on a cool Paris street.

“I want to help him, I don’t like to see him hurting—I don’t want him to end up like her,” Louis reaches for Dan’s skinny wrist and Phil shoves his chest so hard, he stumbles over his heels. The alcohol in the glasses spills out onto the concrete and God isn’t there, he’s never been fucking there, and Dan wishes he’d gone to his grandfather’s funeral. He wishes he knew how to pray. He wishes he knew how to stop fucking crying and he wishes they’d never picked up their pens.

“D-Don’t hit him, Phil,” Dan sobs and continues to claw away. “Let me g-go, I don’t love you—”

“Yes, you do,” Phil doesn’t even look at him. “You love me and you know you do, you know you don’t want to die.”

“Phil, I don’t want to fight with you,” Louis is saying, and he reaches for Dan again. “I just want to help him—”

Phil shoves him harder and Dan’s skull starts to pound when his husband uses his free hand to fist the sunset’s collar. “I swear to God, Louis, if you touch him again—” he growls. “I’ll fucking hit you.”

“Phil, I—”

“Don’t you dare follow us, don’t you dare come knocking tomorrow. He doesn’t need your fucking sympathy,” And then Phil releases him with a shove, moves down the street with Dan crying and running his hands over his stomach. His voice is frightened and his heart is terrified and his mother doesn’t love him, his mother doesn’t want him. They’re far away from the café when he goes to step into road again— _I want to fucking die_ —but Phil stops and wraps his arms around his waist.

Holds him there, shaking.

Jesus died for their love.

“P-Phil, I want to—”

“No, don’t say it,” Phil is tired and angry, red and yellow and Theo was green and Louis was orange and Dan’s never going to see them again. The stars are shining for their misfortune and Van Gogh is painting in one of them when Phil nudges his face into the side of Dan’s and says, “You don’t want to die. Please, Dan, stop it. You don’t want to die.”

“Y-You’re having a child,” Dan hates him and Dan loves him and Dan can’t remember her name, can’t remember the woman he slept with. She’s a piece of the mess their love created, a piece of the chaos and a piece of the beauty. It’s Ella or it’s not.

Until death it is all life.

“I am,” Phil pushes his face closer and his eyes wet on Dan’s skin. He wraps his hands around the man’s pale neck and tries to stable his feet, tries to stable his heart. The sky is black. “I am, Dan, but you—You don’t have to die. You don’t have to go.” 

“I do, Phil,” Dan’s voice is strangled and Phil tightens his hold on him. “I have to g-go, I have to leave—Nobody would care if I—”

“Fuck you, you know I would,” Phil says into his throat. “You know I’d care and you know I’d—”

Nobody gives a fuck what he has to say.

Nobody gives a fuck.

Dan tries to move into the road again but Phil’s there to save his life like he’s the addiction he played right and he takes Dan in his arms and holds them in place. Still life, yellow paint. Van Gogh and his sunflowers.

“I want to _die_ , Phil—Let m-me die, let me hurt—”

“No, sunshine, you can’t,” Phil whispers, and runs his fingers down Dan’s bony back. “Not yet, not when we’re going home. Just stay for me, okay? Just stay.”

“I don’t l-love you, Phil,” Dan cries, but he’s a fucking liar. He’s sobbing in his arms and Paris is cold. Their love is bleeding out, all the way down the streets and all the way up the walls. All the way down the drains, all the way through the windows. There’s a bedtime story about it, a child in space pyjamas.

Shakespeare is rhyming about it and Jesus died for it. Men fight for it, kids cry for it.

“I wish you’d kiss me, Phil,” Dan isn’t sure if his husband said anything. “I wish y-you’d kiss me and love me and—”

“Shh, now,” Phil pushes his lips up to Dan’s ear and Dan melts to yellow paint all over his fingers when he puts his mouth to the skin. _Kiss me, touch me, hold me._ It’s a tiny brush of his lips and Dan gives a whimper.

“P-Please, Phil,” he begs. “Do it again, k-kiss me on my mouth—”

“No, Dan,” Phil whispers, and rubs his thumbs over Dan’s cheeks. “Not here, not now. We need to go home, okay? I need you to stay with me because we need to go home.”

“Phil,” he’s still crying. “Phil, please.”

“What?” Phil says, soft and orange and Dan doesn’t miss Louis yet. “What is it, Dan?”

“That little boy was c-called Theo and his aliens were green and—and you s-shouldn’t have hit, Louis, you hurt him and—” Dan pushes himself down into Phil’s arms. Thin, tiny.

The wind is strong and Van Gogh is dead.

“I love you, Phil,” Dan doesn’t mean to say it, doesn’t even know why he does. He can’t remember if it’s true and he can’t remember if he ever did. He stored money in his glovebox so he wouldn’t spend it on drugs and they say you have to hurt to write, you have to hurt to get it.

They say Phil Lester doesn’t wear his ring anymore and Dan Howell has bled him dry.

“I know, sunshine,” he says, and everything is still. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is shit and I need help rn. If you liked it, please let me know <3


	10. Tactic

**number ten: tactic**

_They_ walk back to the hotel and Dan’s heart is set on killing itself. He’s bunched up at Phil’s side but he tries hard to step into the road again, to free himself and lay down on the tarmac.

God is talking, he thinks. Somewhere.

And maybe he’s not in the sky, maybe that’s a place he’s never been. Maybe he’s in the little shrubs set around the sidewalks, like he’s watching and he’s waiting. Or maybe he’s under the slanted rooftops of shitty, beaten hotels or maybe he’s in the rain. Maybe he’s in the wind or maybe he’s in the fire or maybe he’s—

“Phil.”

Phil looks strange in the hotel hallway. Different, smoother. Dan can’t remember how long they’ve been standing there and he can’t remember if God ever spoke at all. And if he did, what he said.

What he would say, what he wouldn’t.

If he’d feel he had anything to fucking apologise for, the selfish fucking bastard.

“Yeah?” Phil’s got his hand on Dan’s lower back and his touch twists there, like he’s got the nerves wrapped around his fingers. “What is it?”

“The fire,” Dan says. Phil’s kiss is still on the side of his face. “Remember the fire?”

“Fire?” Phil echoes, softly. He’s got the room keys in his hand, Dan’s insides in his other. “What fire, Dan?”

“The one you used to tell me about, the one we used to read about. The fire, Phil. The fire and—and the road with the fire. We have to get to the ocean.”

“Ocean?” Phil’s frown is delicate on his face, and he’s all yellow and all warm and Dan wonders if God made the water blue. He wonders if God made the children sad, their wedding white and the letter scarlet and his friend orange. The wind cold, the summer hot. The sunflowers yellow.

“Yeah, Phil, the ocean,” Dan says. “We have to get to the ocean. With the fire.”

“Dan, I don’t—” Phil stops and shakes his head. He puts the key in the lock and clicks the door open and says, “I don’t think we need to talk about this now, I don’t think this is the time. Come on.”

“What, Phil?” Dan stands there in the doorway. “Phil. What do you mean? Why can’t we talk now, why can’t we talk anymore?”

“Shh, just come on,” Phil reaches back and tries to hook his fingers around Dan’s wrists. But the Xanax blurs, the Xs smudge and he is terrified of everything. His hands come weak and gentle to push his husband away and they’re just trying to get through it, just trying to fight it. They’re just trying to make sense of the world and everything in it and Dan thinks maybe their fear derives from the fact that they don’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing.

Because they’re not in love anymore.

They’re not writing tales anymore.

They stuffed flowers up the cuffs of their blazers but now they’re stuffing them down their throats, choking on the sunflowers and the poppies and the butterflies. The irises. The exercise. The colours on the canvas, the paint in the pot. They’re sleeping in chambers and smoking the stuff, cans and bits and catalysts and streaks of blood through the white of brown eyes. Bottles of withdrawals, stacked on the bottom shelf. Like you can’t withdraw without getting more and _help me, help me, I can’t do this by myself._

They say Dan Howell writes like he’s trying to save his life, but maybe he’s just trying to save one. Maybe the world spins too slow so he can remind you it once span too fast, and maybe he tried drugs behind his school gates so he could artistically depict what it’s like to be an addict and what it’s like to exist just for the next fucking hit. Just for the next fucking drag, for the next fucking song. For the next word to come to form the next ugly sentence, for the lines to be corrected like a blade against the streaks of white.

Dan picks and pulls at words and his head is a succession of rhymes, intertwined and inclined to make no fucking sense. He’s inking down the directions to a medicine cabinet and the number to call for a help, and he doesn’t even have to write _third drawer on the right_ or _treble fucking nine_ because the story is yellow and it’s saving your life. It’s grey and green, orange and blue, but God knows the world doesn’t have to make sense to be understood.

God knows Dan Howell is a work of fucking art.

And God knows that people are frightened of the shit they wish they weren’t, like fearing the piece of glass on the wall will make it drop to the fucking floor. And taking a drug for dysmorphia will “transform ’ya and make ’ya better” but maybe pushing a pen to a piece of fucking paper will save a fucking life. And God knows people are in love with the shit they see themselves in, all the whiskey and the gin and the lace around pencil-tips, the curtains to draw.

The pages of a thesaurus Dan scribbled with _relation._ Scribbled with _state_ and _the motherfucking obvious._ Scribbled with _addiction_ , with _fan_ and _fiction_ and—

“Dan, please,” Dan’s sitting on the end of the bed closest to the window and Phil’s kneeling before him. A bottle of water. Some pills. “Take them, just do it for me—Please. I need you to.”

“No, Phil,” Dan pushes his hands away. He doesn’t remember walking into the bedroom. “I don’t want them. I don’t want that. Don’t make me take them, Phil.”

“You have to, sunshine,” Phil reaches up to touch his cheek and Dan thinks about all the words he could rhyme, all the words he could utter. Pretty. Ugly. Derelict depictions, days with dirty syringes and descriptions down drainpipes. “You have to take them, okay?”

“Not okay,” Dan tells him, and he fucking misses Louis. Misses him like he’d miss the sky if it wasn’t there in the morning. Misses him like he’d miss the lines on his palm if they faded to nothing. And he misses Louis like he’d miss the _not_ if didn’t before come before the _okay_ , and if it wasn’t there at the end of a piece of rope tying his wrists together.

Prisoners.

Exercising.

Dan misses Louis like he’s never going to see him again.

Like his grandfather and his mother. His father and his brother. The house he grew up in, the bedroom he slept in. The toilet he vomited in and the bathtub he cried in and the kitchen he ate in, the garden he rode in. The days with soft teddy bears and strawberry shampoo. Pink on loose curls and Winnie and Roo and the hundreds of acres he would have raced right across. Yellow and blue. Van Gogh and his paint. Cake icing and marshmallows and pink on a tongue.

“Dan,” Phil says. There’s children laughing in the street and Dan writes for their happiness, writes for their yellow. He writes for the moments he should and shouldn’t know about and he writes for the fact he’s the start and the end, the fan in the fiction and the God in the Christian and the pill in the prescription. Nouns and religion, soldiers and ammunition. Red for the French but white for the peace. “Just take your meds, Dan, so we can sleep and this can all go away—”

“Don’t make me have the pills,” Dan pleads. “They’re nasty, they’re sick. I don’t want them, Phil, and they don’t want me.”

And he says it like he’s being asked to fall in love with their taste, like they’re the girl he fucked for his father and they’re the shit on her tongue. The ink on his thumbs. 

They say Dan Howell’s pills are women to make love to, all pink for the -contin that candy contains but all red for the feeling of the nails down his spine. Blue for the sink water he splashed on his face and yellow for the number of his wrecked teenage lover, of his boyfriend and his best friend and _come get me, come get me, I don’t know what to do._

Dan will make love to the colour of the pills in his hand like he fucked the girl at the party with the wine on her breath. Bitter and nasty. Sour and distasteful. Rough hands on soft girls, soft drinks and thinking in fragments of pink. Words seasoned in the filth of older men, impotent and innocent and _a virgin for a stimulant._ And so Dan will make love to the colour of mistakes, to little bumps in so-flat stomachs and tiny fingers of tiny children.

And he’ll make love to his husband because it’s been a fucking while, and it’s easy to down pills when they don’t taste like messy sex or taste like low-cut dresses. It’s easy because they’re blue pills, and they taste like Phil Lester’s mouth. Like _sunshine_ and _baby_ and his eyes between the sheets, peeking out from a pillow soaked through with his sweat. Like his hands on thin hips and his hands on damaged thighs and his knees on cold tiles, his words on frightened ears.

_There used to be a boy who told stories because it made him a story._

Eighteen.

Beautiful.

No money and no sales.

_Tell me the one about the animals, Phil, the animals on the ark._

A girl at a party.

A man with his drugs.

God knows Dan Howell is a work of fucking art.

“Louis would want you to take them, Dan,” Phil is still holding the pills before Dan’s face. “Louis and Theo. And your mom and your dad and Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and—”

“Gauguin,” Dan breathes. “Gauguin and his sunflowers. In the guest room at the yellow house and in—In heaven, Phil, in the stars. Do you believe in the stars?”

“Yes, Dan,” Phil rubs the back of his hand over his face. “Yes, I believe in the stars. Please, just take the pills.”

“But I don’t want to take them. They don’t want me to. Do you remember the pink when she touched me and I touched her, Phil? Do you remember when you screamed at me?”

“What?” Phil’s staring at him. “What are you talking about, Dan?”

“The girl, the—the girl. Do you remember? I did bad things, Phil, and so did you. My dad doesn’t like me no more,” Dan touches the gold of his wedding band. “Her tongue tasted pink and she kissed me on my neck.”

“Stop,” Phil tells him, with a violent shake his head. “Stop talking about that. We don’t talk about that.”

“You say we don’t need to talk about anything.”

“Not that,” Phil says. “Never that. You didn’t mean to.”

“What didn’t I mean, Phil?” Dan peers up at him through frightened eyes. He’s no little or no more than a one-night stand, a string of words with no beginning and a quick fix before sunrise. “What did I do?”

“Slept with her, you—You slept with her and you know you did. You were young. But you told me your father pushed you and you told me you didn’t mean to and it doesn’t fucking matter, even if you did. We fucked up and we’re sorry and so for the love of God, Dan, just take your pills—”

And so Dan puts them on the end of his tongue and he fists the fabric of his pyjamas. The galaxies are bigger on his shoulders and he swallows the pills, swallows the pink and swallows the blue and he’s eighteen and he’s beautiful and his stomach is empty.

“There, okay?” Phil’s got the water to Dan’s lips and Dan’s throat is burning. The fire. The ocean. “It didn’t have to be that difficult, did it? They make you better, even if you don’t think they do.”

“No, Phil,” Dan pushes the bottle away and rubs his mouth on his sleeve. “They scare me, Phil. They make my head funny. Van Gogh painted the sky and his head was all funny, too.”

Phil screws the cap on the bottle and sets it down. “His head was funny without his starry night and without his sunflowers. He just knew what he was doing, he knew how to make it work. He studied art.”

“He studied art. He studied art,” Dan echoes. He taps two fingers against the side of his leg. “He studied art and—Do we study art, Phil?”

“Yeah,” Phil says. Sad and tired and angry. “Yeah, we do.”

“But we’re not as good? We’re not as good.”

“No, we—We’re good. We know what we’re doing, too. We’re good.”

“We’re good,” Dan whispers, and runs his hand over his stomach. Ugly. Bul—ympia. Body dysmorphia and the fire and the ocean.

“You should sleep now,” Phil gestures to the top of the bed. “Go on, go sleep now. Close your eyes and—”

“No,” Dan’s mother used to say he was terrified of everything, used to say he was skittish and say he was boring and say he didn’t matter, like his matter wasn’t there and he wasn’t made of anything. She used to wish she’d never had him and wish she’d never held him and wish she hadn’t raised him on the hymns of salvation, on the trinity and the gospel and the veneration of angels. Motherfucking _angels_. ”No, Phil, it’s—It’s dark when I close my eyes. The shadows are there when I close my eyes. Do you know them, Phil? They get me when it’s dark.”

Phil shakes his head. Nutcase. “No, they don’t. They won’t. Just go and lay up there, go and face the window so it’s lighter and it’s—”

Phil’s phone is on the bedsheets and it starts ringing so fucking loud that Dan reaches for it, grabs it. There’s a woman on the other end.

She calls him Phil, and Dan says, “No, it’s Dan.”

“Dan?” she says. Harsh and rude. Red and red and the taste of all women, the taste of virginity. The symmetry of fuckery, the proximity of obscenity. “It’s Ella. Where the fuck is he?”

“Who, Ella?” The name is horrible on Dan’s tongue. “Who? Have you had Phil’s baby yet?”

“Is he there with you? Where are you?”

“Paris, Ella. With Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and—”

“ _Paris_? You’re in _Paris_?” she spits down the line. “Dan, put him on the phone. I mean it, you fucking do it now. Does he think it’s okay to run off like this?”

“Dan, give me the phone,” Phil is trying to grab it from Dan’s hands. They’re shaking and not gonna make it and there is bleakness in truth. They’re carrying the fire up the road and south to the ocean but Dan’s talking to the women who fucked his husband and is carrying his child, her stomach rounded off like she’s been moulded all wrong and moulded all right. Moulded to look like she’s too big for her height, too red for her white and too _angry_ for _alright._

Dan wishes he could steal the word _responsibility_ right from the page and put it on the scales. Measure its weight, calculate its validity. And he wishes he could put it on the seesaw in that playground he grew up in, to see if it was heavy enough to weigh down its side. And he’d note what he saw—whether it was less or it was more—and he’d write the evaluation up Phil’s arm marked with _fuck you_ and a full stop.

_You were wrong about yourself, my love. You don’t care enough._

And Dan is red when he thinks about Phil’s child growing up without a father to stitch their cardigans with the blue of the sky. He’s red, and he hates him. He came to Paris, and he hates him.

So he throws the phone on the floor and the room is so quiet, the room is so dark. Phil picks up his phone and picks up his mess and he cradles it there, right at his ear, whispering soft words of soft things to hush away the pain.

Paris is red when Dan looks up out of the window.

“I know, I know. I shouldn’t have left without telling you, I should have mentioned when I saw you. But it wasn’t planned, Ella, we decided to go after you’d left.”

The children outside the glass have silenced into the night and Dan wonders if they’re sleeping on despair or on fright. On the light of their childhood, or the taste of Turkish delight. Hot chocolate in their bellies, wrapped tight under warm covers. And Dan hopes their dreams are sugar-coated with the sweetness of pre-pain delicacies.

Dan hopes Louis doesn’t smoke too much and he hopes Theo says his prayers. And he hopes God likes him sometimes, because that’d be pretty fucking nice. Even with pills in his tummy and his fist in his mouth, God likes him and loves him and— 

“Okay, alright. Fuck. Yes, Ella. Yes, I know. You don’t have to keep—I _know_ , you’re fucking pregnant. And I know you’d rather I be there right now but, Jesus, I’d rather I wasn’t taking care of a lunatic. And I’d rather I hadn’t fucked off to some bullshit city, with miserable weather and too-expensive cafés and men who act like they know what they’re talking about. I wish—” There’s a pause. It’s the ocean over the sand. “What? No, fuck you. I don’t wish that at all. Did I say I wasn’t going to be there for you? Did I say I wasn’t going to try? This is my kid, this is my life.”

And then Dan makes a stupid, fucking noise into the corner of his pillow. It’s soft and it’s weak and it’s frightened. Tired and angry and sad. Pages of manuscripts and sheets of narcotics and sex on the tiles, sex in the bathroom and fingers down his throat and _you’re my life, I adore you. Look at me, I adore you._

The why’s and the how’s, the drugs and the vows and the print on the shirts in the middle of the station.

The colour of the Paris sky.

_I love you, it’ll be alright._

The fire and the ocean.

God knows they’re fucking trying.

: :

It’s darker than it’s ever been when Dan wakes up. The aches in his stomach are like knuckles pushing against his skin, forcing their fingers at his ribs to feed on the taste of the bone. White, white, white. Teeth and cocaine. Milk and Phil’s woman and the colour of a wedding day.

It’s darker than it’s ever been.

Dan likes to juxtaposes because he supposes it’s part of his prose. He supposes it’s part of the story, part of the responsibility. But he sees and he saw and he knows that it’s a mess, so he rhymes and he writes because it’s a waste of his life if he stops. Like it’s the gentle pulse in his wrist, and it’s the scar on his left knee. It’s his pills and his Xanax, his grey and his orange and his juxta-fucking-positions.

Phil’s sitting in an awkward position on the end of the bed. Dan doesn’t know what the colour the sky is and he doesn’t want to look at it, doesn’t want to try his luck. He doesn’t think he wants to know. Because the ugliness part of knowing something is having it not know anymore and Dan wishes he was seven and he was playing the wrong cards.

His grandfather’s fingers over the jokers in the deck. Over the confusion, the anticipation. The apprehension and the tactical thinking and the black and the red.

“Phil,” Dan says, and it’s nasty on the air. The man’s got his hands over the shape of his face and they’re touching at his black hair, rubbing over his blue eyes.

There’s nothing and it’s red.

There’s nothing and it’s yellow.

There’s nothing and it’s green, because Dan misses Louis and Dan misses Theo and Dan misses the pen all over his school books. He misses the stashes of cash in his drawer and he misses his husband’s hands on his thighs and he misses the sunset, he misses the ocean.

The fire.

The road.

“Phil.”

He’s shuffling out from under the hot covers and crawling across the mattress. Phil’s still sitting there, and he’s got a bottle in his hands. There’s a mess down the front of his shirt and and red ticks where everything hurts and he’s shaking, he’s crying.

Dan loves him like Adam on the eve of a divorce, loves him like he’s been made from the shape of his ribs.

“Phil, what’s the matter?” Dan whispers, feeling for him through the darkness. Black for funeral dresses, black for sad writers. Black for liquorice and the sounds of the silence. “Phil. It’s me, Phil, it’s Dan. What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”

Dan’s gentle hands touch his shoulders and the man doesn’t move. He’s crying when he slurs, “She doesn’t want me there no more, Dan. She doesn’t want me there.”

“Who, Phil?” Dan’s sitting behind him. Yellow and yellow and Gauguin liked his sunflowers.

“You know,” Phil cries. “Ella. She doesn’t want me, she doesn’t . . . s-s doesn’t want me. No more baby, Dan, we fucked it up.”

“We fucked it up,” Dan echoes him. Over and over and over. They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. And they say Dan Howell and Phil Lester and motherfucking insane. “We fucked it up, Phil, why did we fuck it up?”

“Paris. Arles. Your m-mom and your pyjamas and Louis and me and—and you fucked up, Dan, but I fucked up too,” And Phil brings the bottle to his lips like Dan brings words to the game, brings blades to his skin, and he drowns himself in his husband’s descriptions of a thousand forms of addiction. He drowns himself in the liquor, he drowns himself in the guilt. They had sex on the tiles and smoked on the floor and kissed against the wall, cried behind the door and Dan doesn’t know where home is but it doesn’t fucking matter. Because if he found it, he’d knock, and Phil wouldn’t be there to let him in.

And God is talking, he thinks. Somewhere.

“I’m sorry, Phil,” he whispers, with his arms around his stomach. He’s got his face against his back and he’s holding the man as he drinks because stability comes in small doses when you’re addicted to the doses. The mixture and the substance. It comes not in prescriptions and not in bottles of whiskey, not in too much, too little or plenty because plenty is plenty and Dan’s plenty fucking full.

“It’s my fault, Phil, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll do better, I promise. I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you,” Phil says, with his lips around his bottle. And his voice sounds like he thought he chose a red crayon but it came out fucking yellow and Dan nudges his nose into the smell lingering on his shirt. He’s thinking about Louis and he’s thinking about money and he’s thinking about crying babies when he tells him, “Phil, I’m sorry. My mom came to see me. She came to see me, did you know? I’m really sorry, I really am.”

“I know,” Phil slurs. Nobody gives a fuck. They’re getting high on the couch and it’s all over the carpet. “Stop now. S-Stop talking now. We need to be still.”

“Are you drinking? Phil, are you drinking?”

And Phil doesn’t answer because maybe he thinks Dan’s words have the tools to dig out the trenches of memory and search for the answer. It’s in there somewhere, in the rubble and the war. Bottles and openers, pale fingers and addictions and the concrete of sobriety.

Responsibility.

Dan sees and he saw and he knows God knows they’re trying.

“Phil,” Dan whispers. He’s clinging onto his shirt, scrawny arms around his waist. “Phil, are you scared? Shall I tell you a story?”

“Story?” Phil chokes. He’s crying and he’s hurting and they’re sitting in Paris, but Paris is their Bethlehem. Condemned to religion, to poems of mayhem and murmurs of _amen_ and rhyme, rhyme, rhyme.

“Yeah, Phil. I could tell you a story. I could tell you anything you wanted. Noah’s Ark, Phil, or the fire and the ocean. Or _Don Quixote_ , I’d try my best. God knows I’d try my best.”

“ _Don Quixote_ ,” Phil sobs, and leans back into Dan’s touch. “Used to be your favourite, you know?”

“What, Phil? My favourite?”

“Yeah, sunshine. Your favourite book. You d-don’t remember, but it’s okay. It’s there.”

And Dan’s in love with the words addiction can weave. Like spiders in webs, like they’re at it again and they don’t give a fuck. They need to be still and they need to be quiet but Dan’s love for Phil Lester is raging and wild, the kids on the street and the faith in Theo’s smile. It’s the pattern of the wallpaper and the novels they don’t remember and it’s the intertextuality, the aliens and the gravity and the pink of sexuality, the red of Christianity and the tragedy, the fatality. The purity of drug addiction, the synonyms for romantics so hopeless and shitty that they’re writing in red and they’re writing _I love you_ like it’s the only way they fucking know how to.

Like they’re incapable of forming it figuratively. Like they’re speaking in divided rhymes, words wasted for the fact they want it to look pretty. And Dan hates the fucking egotists, he hates the self-absorption. But he’s writing like he’s submerged himself into fifty feet of deep water, into the red of the sea and the sea in the saw and he saw that Phil Lester’s responsibility didn’t weigh down at all.

He saw that it meant nothing and he wishes they’d never tried.

But he could write a way out of his suicide when he was fifteen years old and he could articulate an emotion with a couple nouns and connotations. He could say shit without saying it, fuck shit without touching it and he’s always been a skit sketched for the fun of it. He’s always been something assembled to entertain, talent shows and assemblies and the instruments he didn’t play, the grades he didn’t get and the mind he didn’t have and the words he didn’t say because they wanted him to say them.

And he can soak words in gin and drown them in affliction like his intention is to make them think he’s a genius. His intention is to make them turn pages intoxicated, read passages with blurry eyes and verses with pre-rhyming minds and their love is a novel because their novels are their love.

Pages of half-torn monologues and spines of damaged books. Their love is monotheistic, their love is believing in God. One, two—

Three puffs and three hits.

Three kicks and one kid and they are the knowledge that things work well if you make them fucking work.

The knowledge that it’s darker than it’s ever been but the words have never come so eloquently, never danced so gracefully. Dan imagines them clad in white gowns and white heels, married to the page and married to the age of paralysed mentalities. Ambien and sedatives, _I broke up with my boyfriend_ and _fuck you, I love you._

A door off its hinges, a love off its tracks. Manchester Station and prints on old shirts and affairs and short skirts and dirty fucking hands. Swollen veins, emergency rooms. Movie adaptions, movie amputations, _you’re gonna end up like him if you keep shooting that shit in yourself._

And Dan didn’t attend his grandfather’s funeral because he was high off his face, so he writes about it instead because it makes him feel better. It makes him feel good. He sits and he scrawls and he hopes God is talking somewhere, hopes God is reading.

He hopes God is listening when his words whisper _I’m sorry._

_I wish I could have done better. I wish I knew you liked me, but I can never be sure of it now._

“I can tell you loads of stories, Phil,” Dan is mumbling into his husband. Clean. Clean. The sky is his friend. “About me and about you. And about Van Gogh and his friends and his paintings and their colours. And about Louis and Theo. And Van Gogh’s Theo, too. And what colour children’s laughter is and what colour all of this wallpaper is and what colour we are right now, in the middle of everything.”

The middle of everything.

Ten, ten, ten.

Paris and stories and the darkest fucking night.

“Don’t t-tell me anything, Dan,” Phil hushes him, bottle against his chest. “Don’t waste your words. They’re good, they’re kind. They have to be still now.”

And Dan thinks his words are still quite enough. Still broken, still wrecked. Still high and addicted and Phil’s hands and Phil’s lips, and _lest we forget_ how recessional is is to fall in love with the moments they never fucking noticed.

“Can you tell me a story, Phil?”

Phil puts a cold hand onto Dan’s arms around his stomach when he slurs, “N-No, sunshine. Not now. Some other time.”

“But why, Phil?” Dan whispers. He squeezes him tight and tries to be still. “I want to you to tell me about the yellow house.”

“Yellow house?”

“Van Gogh. Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and the sunflowers in the guest room. I’d paint you sunflowers if you came to stay, Phil, I’d paint you sunflowers if I knew you loved me and if I knew they made you happy.”

Phil keeps his hand on Dan’s arm and sniffs through the quiet. He doesn’t say _I love you_ , he doesn’t say _I’m sorry._ And Dan misses his lover like he misses the morning. Misses the red and the yellow and the inklings, the stretches of elastic and the tusks of pink elephants. The kicks and acrylics, the kids and their relics and Dan misses his lover like he misses his wrists before he tried to make them look better.

Dan misses his mother and he misses his sanity. He misses the fire, the ocean in the south. He misses the acres of hundreds of opportunities, good friends and good times and _I’m fine, mom, I’m fine—I’ll sleep and I’ll be fine._

“This is the yellow house,” Phil says, with intoxication and deterioration. With liquor in his saliva and his husband on his back. “This is our yellow house. Who says i-it can’t be?”

“Van Gogh didn’t paint it,” Dan tells him, because it’s everything and it’s nothing. “He didn’t, Phil, he didn’t. He died because he was sad and he never wanted to be happy.”

And Dan thinks the saddest of stories are the ones told about people who don’t want to get better because they’re fine just as they are. They’re fine with bloody fingers and fine with whiskey-kisses because there’s hell in their heaven and there’s God in their hell. There’s good writing in their grief, enunciation in their misery. Junctions of their locution-paved roads, idioms and oceans and foreboding through poems.

Out of the blue and back into the grey.

“He painted everything if y-you think hard enough,” Phil slurs with his alcohol in his arms. “This room, and our story. Your mind and my pain and o-our piece of shit plot line.”

Homophones.

Phoning home.

There’d be nobody to answer the door if Dan ever made it back and Phil Lester has always been a fucking liar.

“Tell me a story, Phil,” Dan holds onto him. “Tell me about the ark.”

“No, sunshine,” Phil trembles, and Dan imagines light filtering through the pane. “N-Not now, I told you. When we’re better, when we’re good.”

“When we’re yellow, Phil?”

“Yeah, Dan. Yellow, yeah. Yellow,” And he starts fucking drinking again, the heat on his throat. Dan squeezes under his ribcage and the sky is his friend, out of the blue and black into the grey and darker than it’s ever been.

“Look at the wall, Phil,” Dan tells him. They’re staring right through it. “Number four. It’s clever, isn’t it? We know they’re there, we know they’re listening. I want to read us too, Phil.”

“You don’t need to read us,” Phil is shaking from the cold, and Dan curls the bedsheets over him. “You are us. Just write us to sleep now and we’re all done.”

And Dan wonders if Phil would write him a way out of it if he told him he wanted to die. Dan wonders if he knows enough words to describe going to the stars for Vincent Van Gogh and to describe the clouds that aren’t white, the ones that are fucking blue. They’re less sticky than cotton candy, a little less happy than the pink and the pansy and the poppy and the butterfly, the nothing of the something. Dan frolics when melancholic, symbolic and psychotic all over the blue clouds and all over the shitty topic and _what if the skyscrapers cascaded to the ground?_

What if Phil Lester wrote the world its way to heaven?

What if Phil Lester didn’t take off his fucking ring?

What if Dan Howell had never picked up his pen and what if Jesus had never died for his sins and what if vodka just tasted like gin and what if the fire didn’t melt in the ocean and what if—

“We could get better without doing anything at all,” Dan whispers, still bunched up at Phil’s side. Made from his rib, made from his words. Maybe the fact that they’re not friends and not lovers but they’re the taste on each other’s tongues, the tactics of shitty romantics, so tacky and so hopeless but take notes from the tactless verses. Take notes from the agony and take notes from the pain, from the drug-dealing husbands and the drug-dealing lovers and the drug-dealing -jectives, minus the prefixes because they just mean _addiction._

They say it’s darker than it’s ever been but there’s light through the pane of the window when Phil turns on his side and curls up, and Dan clings to the shape of his back.

“The world is crying, Dan,” Phil’s got his bottle balanced on his chest, hand around its neck. “We can h-hear it, but they can’t. We write because we can and we write because they’re listening. They need us to tell them the world is crying.”

“When can you tell me about the ark, Phil?” Dan murmurs, and Phil threads his fingers through the spaces between Dan’s. Their words sew them together, their teeth are there to be lied through and their stomachs are sloshing with the obsession in compulsion.

Eighteen.

Beautiful.

_Lest we forget._

“If you died I would want to die too, Phil,” Dan tells his silence. He’s crying between his arms. “I love you and you’re yellow. And your baby will be yellow, too. And everything will be okay and nothing will hurt and—and don’t cry, Phil, not when we can still write. Not when we can still pretend.”

And Phil sobs into the sheets with his alcohol down his shirt and Dan leans up to his ear to whisper, “I can read you your book, Phil. It’s in the bag. I remember. I remember, did you know? I can read you a story.”

Dan misses Louis like he’s never going to see him again.

“Shh, Dan. Please, j-just be still now. I don’t want this no more. You said we can get better without doing anything at all.”

And so Dan holds onto his hand and squeezes it tight and the sky is his friend and his mother isn’t alive and his brother doesn’t talk to him a whole lot anymore. Sometimes you can’t withdraw without taking more and sometimes responsibility didn’t weigh down at all, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s the middle of everything and Dan’s rhyming _seesaw_ with _be-fore_ and trying to find his mother’s voice. Trying to remember what his thighs used to look like, his pyjamas used to feel like.

The galaxies are bigger on his shoulders.

The grass is greener in Theo’s eyes.

And God knows wordplay is a genius’ game, like God knows -contin contains too much contin-candy.

“If you died I would want to die too, Phil. Your baby will be Van Gogh’s yellow.”

And God knows they’re fucking trying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this entire thing in one sitting, so sorry if it’s a little shitty and there are mistakes. I have no idea where it all came from at two o’clock in the fucking morning but God bless my fucked head.


	11. Episodic

**number eleven: episodic**

_The_ world is still crying when Dan wakes up the next morning. He’s cold and empty, knees to his chest and sheets between his fingers. There’s rain on the glass but he doesn’t think it’s raining, doesn’t think the sky still speaks of its sadness. It’s not grey anymore and it’s not blue. Not white. But there’s a despondency to the world and Dan imagines it curled up like a fist, like its protesting the very art of getting the fuck on with it.

And he doesn’t think the earth likes ignorance and he doesn’t think it’s all that fucking pretty in his first moments. Because people pretend, and it’s sad and it’s blue. They’re not good enough at exhibiting emotions and they need people like Dan to draw attention to the way they dress themselves up in business suits and tailored trousers so they can look at him and say _fuck you_ when he says _you’re all the same._

And there’s a despondency to the world and it’s curled up like a fist, like its protesting the very art of getting the fuck on with it.

The very art of hopelessness because the world is sick and tired that next morning and Dan can’t articulate it well enough. It’s crying but it doesn’t want anyone to know and Dan thinks he just has to be okay with that being okay, like he just has to be okay with the weight on his shoulders (the responsibility he sees and he saw) and he just has to be okay with the Paris fucking hotel room.

Van Gogh and Doré, Noah’s Ark and Paul and Gauguin and Phil Lester knelt down in a grey shirt and baggy bottoms before the opened compartment of a dresser.

“Phil,” Dan says his name. Weak and pathetic.

The man turns and he’s got a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his hand gripping onto the wood. “Oh, morning,” he says. “I found some shit, come look.”

His voice is orange and Dan thinks about Louis. He thinks about his aliens and he thinks about his apartment, the white but the colour and the colour but the sketches. He thinks about the prisoners and he thinks about the traffic cones, thinks about the tarmac. The fire and the road. Junctions of locutions, worn trainers on tired feet and bicycle wheels over potholes long forgotten to fix up. Dan thinks about Louis and he thinks about life vests, thinks about the ocean. The boats in the storms and the grey of the sky and the world when it’s angry, God when he’s mad. Metaphors of fists on countertops and voices against thin walls, orange and orange and a _goodbye_ never spoken, a sad mother and a sick mother and—

“Phil,” Dan says. “Louis’ mom is sick.”

Phil is shifting through the dresser and making too much noise when he disregards, “I know, sunshine. He told me, I know. Come look now, come see.”

“Will I see Louis again, Phil?”

“I don’t know,” Phil’s shoulders rise and fall again. He’s the cityscape before it sleeps, the moments it’s drowsy and the moments it’s still and the moments the buildings are pieces of the horizon. The moments the sky is soggy with spilled-orange.

“What if Louis comes and knocks on the door, Phil?”

“He won’t,” Phil mumbles, still hunting through the bottom of the dresser.

“But what if he does? What if he does, Phil?”

Phil’s silent as he shuts the wood and stands to his feet, positioning his cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he walks over to the bed. He’s got records stuffed under his arms.

“Look what I found, sunshine, look at them,” he says, laying them down on the sheets. “Records. Music. Music is good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, Phil, music is good,” Dan nods, slowly. He reaches forward and tries to touch the old, washed out covers but Phil’s moving so fast, shifting the albums and singles and bobbing his cigarette in the strong crook of his lips and none of them are still long enough for Dan’s haziness to brush.

And Dan’s head is in the days in the clubs with the speed, amphetamine in the quicker scenes with vibrant-green shots. He’s with the short skirts and the perfume, the girls and the boys and the dim bathroom lighting. The rackets and the music, the cocaine and the liquor and the _get me a fix so my head can write about the way it makes it feel._

“Shall we play one? Choose one,” Phil tells him, and stands back to breathe smoke into the hotel’s stuffy air. “Choose one, sunshine, do it now.”

Dan stares at the records and mumbles, “Are you going to tell me a story soon, Phil?”

He peers down at him, with a cigarette and a befogging structure and an arm around his stomach. And Dan’s heart plays on his beauty like it’s the strings of an instrument, like his admiration plucks cords and sends pretty noises pirouetting through the quiet. The nothing. Their love is dancing in recitals and musicals, in the theatre and on the stage and before the fourth wall. Before the confused eyes. Before the _I don’t get it_ and _he’s losing his fucking mind._ And they built their devotion of bricks and of stone, of cement mixed with mayhem and obsession and catastrophe. Dan’s feelings for Phil Lester loaded bullets and fired the ammunition, scared away citizens in the dead of two thousand and nine. They rained tears of war on cities abandoned and kept tallies of casualties, cuckoo concussions and carefully coordinated commands that rang through the chaos and the calm.

His juvenile idée fixe plotted counterattacks, ignited conspiracies and charged light-brigades and devastated countries constructed of compassion. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. In love with the conflict, the nightmares and post-trauma so traumatically committed to commitment and disorder. In love with the tactics, in love with the nightmare.

Prisoners.

Exercising.

Dan fell in love with the drugs and the war, with the places in the ground he couldn’t touch because they were rigged with explosives, but he fell in love with the devastation and _where’s the fun without destruction?_ and he fell in love in with the juxtaposition, the repetition and the soldiers. The telegraphs and the knife wounds three inches from the spine.

“A story? Do you want to read a story?” Phil says, and Dan can’t remember if he asked for a story or if he asked for a poem about the weapon in his back. “Why didn’t you say, Dan? We have books, we have stories. We are stories. Look at this, Dan, look—”

And then Phil moves across the room to the side of the bed, takes the cigarette out of his mouth and picks up the bag from the floor. He reaches inside and retrieves a book and yellow bleeds between the ventricles in Dan’s chest.

“My book, you have it,” Phil walks back and gives it to Dan. “You have it and choose a record.”

Dan’s fingers are careful around the edges of the cover. “Can’t you read it to me, Phil?”

Phil exhales clouds of smoke with a shake of his head. “Soon.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How long is that?” Dan asks him. He’s holding the book tight against his chest. The galaxies are bigger on his shoulders. “How long is soon?”

“Soon is soon,” Phil puts his cigarette back in his mouth and takes a record from the bed. He’s already walking over to the player when he says, “Shall we listen to this one? I think we should listen, Dan.”

“Together?” Dan says. “Can we listen together, Phil? Please, can we?”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll listen together. Music is good,” Phil is crouched a distance from Dan again for a few moments but his fingers and his mind are fast-working, fast-thinking, and he stands up with his cigarette through the sound of guitar strings and then the steady roll of a drum-beat like rhythm and poetry. Like knuckles against a door.

Like bathrooms and toilets and fingers down a throat.

“Music is good,” Dan says, echoing the man who is walking back and forth beside the record player. “What’s this, Phil? What’s this playing, what’s this sound?”

_Two of us riding nowhere, spending someone’s hard earned pay._

Dan is clinging to Phil’s book and his mind takes the words, breaks them up so he doesn’t choke when he swallows them whole.

 _You and me Sunday driving, not arriving_ —

“The Beatles, it’s a pretty sound.”

— _on our way back home._

“Pretty sound,” Dan says and Phil holds his cigarette between his fingers and puts his other hand in the air, moving it to the sound and the rhythm of the track. Yellow. Yellow. He’s orange and he’s patient, quick and chaotic and he’s losing his fucking mind.

“We’re on our way home,” Phil hums the words to the music, to the pretty noises and pretty instruments. And then he laughs around his cigarette, just once but it’s hard and breathes, “Fuck, sunshine, I almost forgot. I bought breakfast, from the café.”

“Breakfast?” Dan whispers. He’s sure Phil doesn’t hear over the soft music and he’s sure that doesn’t matter because Phil’s head is so orange and it doesn’t want the red. Doesn’t want French soldiers, doesn’t want shitty metaphors. It wants noise and it wants movement, wants quick feet to form routines and to shuffle down yellow brick roads.

“Yeah, breakfast. Breakfast for me and breakfast for you,” And he’s suddenly got this brown bag in his hands and he’s opening it up, taking out some bread with butter and jam and putting his cigarette out in the ashtray. He sinks his teeth into the food and Dan thinks about the red of strawberries, of sweetness and sugar and he thinks about his blood running down his arms.

“I don’t want breakfast, Phil,” he shakes his head. Red, red, red.

_You and me burning matches, lifting latches._

“Breakfast is good, I bought it for you,” Phil is standing in his grey shirt and holding the brown bag before his face. The food is strong in Dan’s nose. Sickly pleasant. Rich. “Have it, sunshine, take a bite.”

“Not yet, Phil,” Dan pushes his hands away weakly. “Please, not yet. I don’t want to cry, I don’t want to be sick. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.”

_We’re on our way home._

“Van Gogh,” Phil says. He’s tapping his foot against the carpet. “He’s dead now, isn’t he? He died.”

“Yeah, Phil. He was sad.”

“And you,” Phil nods, with his teeth around the bread. He swallows the mouthful and says, “You’re sad, too. Aren’t you, sunshine?”

“Yeah,” Dan whispers. His stomach is whining and he pushes his cold fingers over the sounds. The world is protesting the very art of getting the fuck on with it, but Dan thinks it’s beautiful because everything is beautiful. And everything is something and something is everything, and he rhymes when he writes because it’s pretty and it’s nice and they say it makes people feel alright. They say it’s poetry, they say it’s art. But Dan says _it’s me starving myself so I write ugly shit you’ll call gorgeous_ and he says _I have bulimia_ and waits for their answer. Like they define his state of mind, they define the way he writes. Like they are him and he is them and _what if we are everything they say we are?_

What if we are everything they say we’re not?

And what if we couldn’t decide which one was worse?

Dan says _yeah_ to his husband like it’s enough for them to understand he would set fire to the shit he’s written if Phil Lester told him to. He would set fire to the words printed on white pages, soaked in cocaine and scattered in teeth-marks and he would push his thoughts about Louis under the blue of tidal waves until the orange had drowned and blurred to nothing. And it would make sense because it wouldn’t.

Like Dan makes sense because he doesn’t.

And that sentence makes sense because it doesn’t.

“Why are you sad, sunshine?” Phil asks, and he’s staring out of the window. “Smile, eat your breakfast. Everything is swell. Do you want a cigarette? I’ll open the window for you, come smell the rain.”

“Phil,” Dan says, soft and with the book close to his chest. He wishes they could write a painting and he wishes God would listen when Phil Lester cracks open the window after brushing the crumbs off his hands. Dan thinks about the words he’s crushed down to nothing and how Olympia is an eating disorder and Louis is orange and the sun is overrated. Theo is green, the world is still crying. The Beatles make pretty sounds and Phil’s baby will be yellow and Van Gogh wouldn’t be an artist if he’d have died happy.

Van Gogh wouldn’t be an artist if he didn’t know that.

“Yeah, Dan?” Phil’s standing by the window when the song fades to nothing and the silence comes loud, comes like _go read all those poems about the volume of silence because I can’t be fucking bothered to explain it to you._ And the world is crying, God made the children sad. God made the summer hot and God made the sunflowers yellow. Phil starts walking back to the player. “Let’s listen again, I want to listen again. The Beatles have pretty sounds, Dan.”

“I want you to read to me,” Dan whispers, as the man crouches down by the player and the song begins again. _Two of us riding nowhere_. “I want you to read to me, Phil, don’t play that.”

“It’s a pretty song, Dan, music is good,” Phil says, and increases the volume level. It’s loud on Dan’s ears and the bag of food is still before him. Bread and jam and butter. His stomach doesn’t understand that everyone is lonely and everyone is sad, and everyone needs something more than they want it. And his stomach doesn’t understand that Dan Howell doesn’t understand loneliness cannot be cured alone.

Like bleeding words cannot fix bleeding people. And bleeding people cannot fix bleeding things. And it’s a sequence, of sorts, a way to pass the time and a way to make it rhyme and a way to pretend that scrawling words on sheets of paper and letting the breeze take them to the ocean is a form of fucking poetry.

But it’s funny, Dan thinks. It’s funny because he’s not a poet and he’s never fucking wanted to be. And if he tried to write a poem, it would turn into a story. And if he tried to write a quatrain, it would turn into four stations. And if he tried to write a chapter, it would turn into eleven.

Because he tried to write about the sunset and it turned into a person and he tried tried about orange and it turned into autumn and he tried about Van Gogh and it turned into bleeding.

It turned into yellow.

It turned into Jesus.

It turned into Phil taking another cigarette out of a packet and holding his lighter in his free hand.

“Do you want a cigarette, Dan? Let’s smoke together. Like we used to, like we loved to.”

And Dan’s holding onto the words he inked up his arm when he thinks about them on the carpet, thinks about them thinking and writing and working. He thinks about Phil’s arms around his hips in the kitchen and he thinks about red wine, thinks about his lips covered in the shit and he thinks about the red of French soldiers in the war. 

“I want you to read me your words,” Dan says, and he’s sure the music is too loud. “Phil, I want to read. Read and write.”

_Two of us sending postcards._

“Have a cigarette, I’ll light you one,” Phil shifts the brown bag on the bed and sits cross-legged before Dan, bringing a cigarette to his closed mouth. “Open your mouth, Dan. Please, smoke with me.”

Dan puts his little hands to his mouth when he mumbles, “No, Phil. I don’t want to smoke with you. I don’t want to smoke, Phil, Louis thinks I shouldn’t.”

_You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead._

And Dan’s heart speaks of the fire, speaks so often of the ocean. And nobody gives a fuck but if Phil died, he would want to die too. They’re eighteen and beautiful sitting on the thin mattress and Dan’s fingers are shaking when he takes the cigarette. He writes his lungs as pages and the smoke as fire, and he says _yeah_ to his addiction like it’s enough for them to understand he has burnt his life to fucking ashes because Phil Lester told him to.

Loaded cannons, fired ammo. Trained his tongue to speak in bullets and his heart to beat for attention, for the knuckles on the door and the wind on the top floor when he rhymed _suicide_ with _that kid who died_ and told himself to fight it. For the French soldiers were red and the others didn’t matter, for Phil Lester was an addict and a shitty fucking writer. But his words are the wounds three inches from Dan’s spine and his nouns put the yellow in Van Gogh’s yellow house.

He trained his head to work on cocaine and open hotel windows and he trained Dan Howell to murder fear with divided breaks of thought. Fleeting feelings of his parents with pills and parenthesis and his guilt with running faucets, bloody fingers with metal taps and agony with alliteration as if art is asymmetrical to acculturation.

He trained Dan Howell to make words fuck other ones and drain them of definition. And to make verbs tryst their -ads and get high with their dictions.

“There you go, sunshine, like old times,” Phil is careful in lighting Dan’s cigarette and Dan shuts his eyes when he breathes the shit in. Red, but black. Black, but grey. The smoke doesn’t like it in Dan’s sore throat, so he coughs it back up and opens his eyes.

Phil’s already pacing across the carpet again, cigarette and singing-voice and wrecked fucking head. And Dan wonders when they say he’s losing it, they’ll know what they mean by _it._

And they’ll know if _it_ wants to be fucking lost.

Dan blows smoke out of his lips and watches his husband. He’s got his ring on his zero and his ring on his nine and he’s eighteen and beautiful. “I thought we were going to smoke together, Phil,” he says. “Come sit with me, come together—”

“Come Together,” Phil raises his hand and his fingers start clicking. “That’s a song, too. Do you know that one, Dan? Come Together.”

“Is it The Beatles too, Phil?” Dan asks him, around his cigarette. It’s nice between his lips and safe in the corner of his mouth. “Does it have pretty sounds, too?”

“Yeah, Dan, yeah,” Phil is back at the bed, shifting through the records with fast hands. One slides off the bed and clatters to the floor and he spits, “Fuck,” before retrieving it.

Dan leans forward to run his fingers along the worn edges.

“It doesn’t look hurt, Phil,” he tells the man. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t look hurt either,” Phil holds his cigarette before his lips and uses the back of his hand to brush his fringe from his eyes. Black like funeral dresses, black like his thumbs. “Am I okay, sunshine?”

“I don’t know, Phil.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” he pauses. “You know, Dan.”

_You know, Dan._

A pad under his nose, a shitty ink pen. A head on his shoulder and an arm around his waist and _just write, baby, just write._ Trained to never stopping, to keep moving his hand. Over and over and over. Because words are shitty colours and maybe Van Gogh only painted for yellow, so Dan will write until he finds the word he will use decorate his house.

And what a gorgeous thing it must be, he thinks. To adore something so much, you’d let it kill you.

“Phil,” Dan says. Soft, pathetic. Sad and tired and angry. “I don’t know. Please, I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” Phil puts the record back down on a huff and shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t either. Funny, right?”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan mumbles, and watches the way the smoke rolls out of his cigarette. There’s cocaine smudges and teeth marks in the shade and he thinks about the colour of Phil’s shirt on their wedding night. The colour of the sheets, the milk in the sky. _Love you, love you—love you forever_. “Can we read now?”

“Soon, sunshine, I told you,” Phil says, and he’s standing by the fucking window. “Hey, come over here. Come smell the rain.”

“The rain?” Dan echoes. He takes a drag and everything is yellow, blending into the scape of grey. Because Phil is grey and the sky is grey and it’s crying because God made it sad. It’s crying because God made everything sad, but Dan knows he’s trying. Like he tried when he made Eve of Adam’s bones, Dan of Phil’s words and Juliet of Romeo’s blood. Like you can’t be in love without being the same, or some shit.

You can’t write a poem without knowing some lines are as entitled to make no sense as they are to read well.

“Yeah, come and smell the rain,” Phil pushes the window further and leans out of it. His voice comes muffled behind the cigarette. “Fuck, there’s a ledge—There’s a ledge here, Dan, come see. We can climb.”

And it’s the nineteenth year, the year of the breeze and the year of the windows and the slanted roofs. Smoking weed under a sky Dan can’t remember and doesn’t know if he’d want to because Phil’s mouth tasted like heaven if Dan ever knew it. And he thinks if he did know it, it would just be his husband’s tongue when it’s laced with incoherency and obscene words he’s softened with beautiful adjectives in that pretty fucking way he does.

Because Dan’s heaven is Phil’s mouth.

And Dan’s heaven is Phil’s words.

And Dan’s heaven is the way he looks under the sky, whether it’s red or it’s yellow or it’s nothing at all. His heaven is climbing ledges— _one foot, don’t fall_ —and his heaven is smoking pot, Phil’s fingers on his cracked lips with the touches of a cigarette. Phil’s eyes and the pages Dan would drown in the ocean, trained to the waves and trained to the tide. 

And he doesn’t think he’ll ever know it, but his heaven would be a world in which he got to choose his heaven. Because his heaven would be Phil. And his heaven would be them. And his heaven would be The Beatles because they make pretty sounds, just as much as it would be Theo because his grass would be green. And just as much as it would be Louis, with the sunset against the rooftops and the fire of his patience. And the sky could be yellow or the sky could be red because Dan’s heaven would be a place in which people believed in what they could see, rather than what they wished they did.

In which the darkness was a friend of the silence and the silence was not used so often in poems and Dan was never told he was a poet. In which Phil could find his record and Dan could make his mother happy and neither of them would be so terrified of that meant. 

And Dan’s heaven would be a place in which neither he or Jesus would pretend to pretend to believe in each other.

Like his heaven would be a place in which everyone deserved a heaven. And everyone just fucking _got it_ , and they never asked any questions. And everyone was an artist and knew they fucking were and everything was a piece of everything because then nothing could just be nothing. And Dan’s heaven would be simplicity of the most confusing sort, something that makes sense because it doesn’t and is beautiful because it’s ugly. His heaven would be Dan and his heaven would be Phil and his heaven would be them on the carpet and in the rain, on the roof and in Paris and in their shitty flat in London. It would be them with syringes just as much as it would rings because heaven is no right and heaven is no wrong and heaven is no heaven, maybe, but that’s Dan’s heaven in itself.

People that don’t talk when they’re supposed to be quiet and people that aren’t quiet when they’re supposed to say something. Children that aren’t sad just because that’s what they are and parents that weave love into the moments it’s needed, not the moments it’s not. Dan’s heaven is a place in which they know the difference between the two, and in which Van Gogh doesn’t need yellow paint to make him happy and Dan Howell doesn’t need a heaven because his heaven is right now. Or because he was never told that he needed one in the first place.

And nobody gives a fuck but his heaven would be a conversation with God, in which he could say, “Fuck you. I never you liked you anyway.”

It’s the nineteenth year.

“Phil, don’t climb out,” Dan’s got a hand around the man’s arm and another around his cigarette. “What if you drop, Phil? What if you fall?”

“What if I _fly_ , sunshine?” Phil’s head is out of the window and he settles back inside the room for a moment, only to heave himself up onto the windowsill. Dan’s hands shuffle around his waist and he’s got a drug in his mouth when he holds tight onto his husband. “I won’t fall, Dan, I won’t fall. Go play me the song again.”

“No, Phil,” Dan says. “Read me a story.”

Phil is leaning up for the latch on the opposite window. “I don’t know any stories. Not good enough for you, not good enough for now. We sounded too much like poets last time, we shouldn’t do that again.”

“Do what again, Phil?”

“Rhyme so much,” Phil’s cigarette is balanced between his lips when he unhooks the latch, and he looks like he used to after they fucked in his bedroom. “Here, sunshine, climb up. Let me lift you.”

Dan steps back from clinging to the man’s waist. “I want to smoke together, Phil. That’s what you said. That’s what you said and you made me do it.”

“No,” Phil says. “You wanted to. Like you used to want to. I’m going to lift you now, yeah?”

And he leans and hooks his arms around Dan’s tiny waist to hoist him up onto the space beside him. The city seems different, except not the kind-of different that Dan cares to name. He doesn’t care enough about any of it to name it, but he does drag his finger along the pane and murmur, “Why is the world crying, Phil?”

He’s sick with the smell of bread and jam.

“Because it’s sad.”

“Like me?”

“Yeah, Dan. Like you.”

“And like you?”

“And like me,” Phil rests his shoulder against the glass. “And like everyone.”

“Everyone?” Dan asks softly. The music is still playing, but they’re talking loud enough. The Beatles make pretty sounds, but these men even prettier. “Everyone. Like Louis and like Theo. And Van Gogh’s Theo, too. Gauguin and Doré and The Beatles and my mom.”

“Your mom,” Phil mumbles. He’s drawing patterns on the bottom of the glass. “Your mom, sunshine, yeah. And Louis’ mom. Louis’ mom is sad.”

“Everyone is sad.”

“Everyone is sad,” Phil nods on the words. He blows smoke into the space between them and Dan sits there doing the same, thin hands on his thin knees and a city not grey, not blue and not white. And they don’t write romances, but someone could write one there. Someone could write it beautiful and not acknowledge that beauty is parallel. They could knead the pages with knuckles bleeding out romanticism all over the phrases and they could ignore the fact that the opposite is being aware and that overly-physical, overly-cynical virgins would much rather just fuck than fall in love.

And Dan would rather do the same, he thinks.

But he’s not a virgin and he’s not a woman. And if he were, he wouldn’t make himself a cliché. Because he’s not an author that pretends a woman has to be in love before she has sex and that it always has to be with a man, never with her adolescent curiosity. Never with that girl who made her feel dirty before he made her feel pretty. And never with that girl who tasted like vodka-shots rather than strings of fucking cinnamon because it just doesn’t happen, it just doesn’t work.

Girls kiss girls and it doesn’t taste like cinnamon. It doesn’t like heaven because Dan’s heaven wouldn’t have a taste.

And they don’t write romances but if they fucking did, Dan would make it taste like vodka and he would make it taste like _fun._ He would make it taste like a curse word in the middle of a glamorous passage, like _girls kiss boys and boys kiss girls, watch how eloquently I fuck that up._

But Dan is not a poet and Dan is not an artist. 

He’s not anything that would allow him to stitch pretty words together and give them to babies as fucking cardigans because babies do not want cardigans, nor will they ever.

“Why do people not understand things, Phil?” Dan asks the man, who is still sat there drawing with his cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Babies and women and Van Gogh with yellow paint. No space on the ark, no room in their heaven.”

“I don’t know,” Phil tells him. “But none of it is our problem, sunshine. Van Gogh and his paint and the world and its mess, it’s not our problem. We can’t solve it.”

“But we can write about it.”

Phil’s lips are curled into a smile, but they have been for a while. His foot is drumming against the wall below the windowsill. “But we can write about it. Like right-ers. We put it right. We put it right with the words we write. It’s clever, isn’t it, Dan? Tell me it’s clever.”

“It’s clever, Phil,” Dan says. “It’s clever, it’s good. We’re smoking together and everyone is sad.”

Phil is continuing to draw on the glass. “Everyone is sad. Van Gogh and his yellow paint.”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan nods. “Yellow paint, did you know? Is Ella sad, too?”

“Ella,” Phil tries the name, and Dan wonders what she tastes like on his tongue. Red or grey, orange or blue. “Ella is—I don’t know what Ella is. I’m sorry, sunshine.”

“It’s okay, Phil,” Dan whispers to him. “Your baby will be yellow.”

“Yellow,” Phil echoes, under his breath and concentrated on his drawing on the glass. “Yellow is nice, yellow is good.”

“Yellow is good, Phil,” Dan pauses to smoke his cigarette. “Why is Ella pregnant?”

“Because I’m having a tiny child.”

“But why, Phil? Why?”

“Because I fucked up and this isn’t a romance, so I’m not good with safe sex,” Phil’s laugh is a giggle and he shakes his head, brings his eyes back down to the window. _Losing it, losing it_. “It was all red, Dan.”

Dan’s heart is sad and tired and angry. He’s thinking about school jumpers. “Red isn’t good, Phil. Red is bad. We’re red sometimes.”

“I know, sunshine,” Phil says. “I’m going to write my baby poems, you know? I’m going to write loads and loads of poems.”

“Can you write me a poem?” Dan asks, smoke pouring out of his mouth. He misses Louis and his aliens. “Phil. Can you write me a poem? A pretty one, with pretty words. And pretty sounds like The Beatles.”

“The Beatles,” Phil glances back to the player. “Yeah, yeah. Pretty things, sad things. I’ll write you a poem soon, Dan.”

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

“Why not now, Phil?”

“Not now,” Phil shakes his head. “Just not now.”

“But soon?”

“Soon, sunshine. And I’ll read it to you, too. Noah’s Ark and all the animals and my story and all my words.”

“Yeah, Phil, yeah,” Dan’s heart is aching, stomach whimpering. Bread and jam and butter. “All of that, Phil, and _Don Quixote_ , too.”

“ _Don Quixote_ is your favourite. Right now, it’s your favourite. And you remember because you—Look, Dan, look what I drew on the window,” Phil reaches across to tug on the man’s arm and he sits forward, leans to stare at the glass. It’s messy and sad, Dan thinks. It doesn’t make a bit of sense. But the greatest shit is the shit that doesn’t and God knows it’s Dan’s heaven, just like he knows he’s not a part of it.

“What is it, Phil?”

“It’s the station,” Phil tells him. Quatrains and tracks and prints on old shirts.

“Our station?”

“Yeah. Our station.”

The drawing doesn’t look like a station and it’s already fading when Phil puts his finger to the centre of it and says, “We stood right here, didn’t we? We said pretty things.”

“Yellow things.”

“Yeah, Dan. Yellow things,” Phil’s smiling. He’s going to write his baby poems but Ella says he’s not allowed to read them and Dan can’t remember if he ever knew why. “Do you remember what you said?”

“What, Phil?”

“In the station. Do you remember what you said?”

“Yeah, I remember. I remember, Phil,” Dan is sitting there in his space fucking pyjamas and he’s scrawny and he’s cold and the world is crying, but you’d never fucking know. “Do you remember what you said, too?”

“I remember, sunshine,” Phil says. They are light and dark, fast and slow. Romance and poetry and pieces of bullshit sequences that have never made sense but you can never fucking forget it. Manchester Station and no golden rings, no zeroes and no nines and no stories to tell. Phil reaches up and draws lines across the window, muttering, “Look. Do you know what this is?”

“Lines, Phil.”

And Dan realises he knows so many forms of a line, knows how to articulate the very descriptions of them all. Lines of cocaine, white across the basins to breathe through his nose. On their wedding days and in the doorways and on the concrete steps. On the carpet, on the table. And lines in the novels, Dan’s favourites and then the romances and the ones Phil Lester used to read him. And the lines patterned on roadsides you’re supposed to stay inside and the lines in shitty relationships you’re not allowed to cross.

The lines on Phil’s shirt when they stood in the station.

“Yeah, lines. On my shirt,” Phil says. He lifts his legs up and kneels on the windowsill, and pushes the window further open. The breeze comes to tickle at Dan’s chest under his loose pyjamas.

“You remember it, Phil?” he asks him. “What you were wearing? Lines.”

“I remember,” Phil nods. “I remember. Look at the world, Dan, look what we could do with it.”

“Can you write about it?”

“You can, sunshine. You can write about the grey and you can write about the tears. And I’ll read you a tale when soon comes around,” Phil glances back to the record player. “These songs are so pretty. Aren’t they, Dan? The Beatles and their music. My baby will be yellow.”

“Yeah, Phil, yeah. I want you to say it, Phil,” Dan looks at him. He’s grey and he’s something, but Dan doesn’t know what he is. If he did, he would write about him. And if he knew what Phil wanted him to do with the world, he would write about that too. “I want you to tell me what you said in the station. With the lines on your shirt and the lines on the tracks.”

“And the lines we drew between us,” Phil watches his finger dance across the glass. “I told you that you looked like a poem. I said, “You look like a poem, sunshine, like a thousand pretty words.””

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan’s voice comes poignant around his cigarette. ”And I told you that I would write a thousand poems for you, about the station and the train tracks and all the different colours.”

Because the day wasn’t red when they met in the station, but it wasn’t yellow and it wasn’t orange. It wasn’t green, it wasn’t grey. And God knows Dan’s trying but he can’t fucking remember if it was anything at all.

“Do I still look like a poem, Phil?” Dan asks him, and the man peers over him from where he’s knelt with his hand around the window frame.

“Yeah, sunshine. You look like a poem. But you look like a different one and that doesn’t have to mean anything. Or it can mean the world, if you want it to,” Phil looks back to the city. “Like you mean the world. And I mean the world. And all the little children mean the world and so do all the sad skylines and all the shitty feelings and all the broken rhymes. The people who try too hard and the parents who don’t know enough and the cities with grey windows and the cities with grey walls.”

Dan starts shuffling on the windowsill and playing with the threads on Phil’s shirt. And he thinks if he had one, his heaven would be grey.

His heaven would be Phil taking around his cigarette and his heaven would be _soon_ so much more than _right now._ A window’s latch that is too stiff again and his husband’s hand on the sleeve of his pyjamas.

“The galaxies are bigger on my shoulders,” he tells him. “Look, Phil. Touch them.”

And Phil puts his hand there, on the skinny space beside Dan’s neck. He smiles at him, and Dan’s already smiling back.

“Remember when you held me, Phil?”

“In the station,” Phil says. “I held you in the station.”

“You held me in the station.”

“And we went to my house and I showed you my words. And we spoke about writing and we spoke about Jesus and I loved you a little bit, I loved you that day.”

“I know, Phil,” Dan says. Nutcases. “I loved you, too. Why don’t you believe in God?”

“I just don’t, Dan. I loved you and God doesn’t believe in me.”

“But God is here, Phil,” Dan looks around the room. The window and the city and the tears on the glass. “Theo told me, you know Theo. God is here.”

“God is here,” Phil echoes. And his smile is everything beautiful, so his smile is everything sad. “But he doesn’t have anything to say. Does he, sunshine?”

And Dan doesn’t think he has a heaven. He doesn’t think he does because he’d never be allowed one but if everybody deserved one and we all got to choose, his heaven would be a place with postcards and cigarettes and a knife wound bleeding three inches from his spine. His heaven would be a place in which God knew what to say or maybe a place in which he never said anything at all.

Because his heaven would be Dan.

And his heaven would be Phil.

And his heaven would be a heaven that wasn’t told it needed a hell because his heaven would be them.

And his heaven would be both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is very psychological and I can’t wait until it’s all done and complete so I can explain everything to you. There are so many layers and I’m finally able to start playing around with Phil’s character more. If you question both of their sanities and maybe sometimes your own, then I feel I’m writing this story correct. Also, I hoped you enjoyed the chapter. This is definitely one of my favourites. Let me know what you thought <3


	12. Relic

**number twelve: relic**

_The_ Beatles drive the men through the day. It gets colder as the time passes and Dan lies under the sheets with his heart on his sleeve. It’s bleeding out onto his pyjamas but he doesn’t mind the organ being there, doesn’t mind what it means. He wishes he could take better care of it, or maybe he just wishes Phil would. Maybe he just wishes his mother had and so had his father. And so had his friends and so had his teachers. Because his heart bleeds for them, for all of them, and he’s in a shitty Paris hotel room when he realises a chest without the heart they hurt is a chest quite fucking lovely.

Phil sits on the windowsill throughout the hours. He’s there at six and there at seven and there at eight. Through the sunrise, long past lunchtime. He’s smoking packets of cigarettes and Dan doesn’t remember how to ask him to stop.

The world cries for him, too. The world cries for both of them.

It starts raining some time into the afternoon or maybe it’s still the morning but Dan sits there with the brown bag in his arms and a whining stomach and he doesn’t know enough words to make the pain go away. And he thinks, in a twisted sort-of way, that’s what this entire shit is about. Because he wishes he had the words, and he likes pretending that he does. And he wishes he could form sentences to bring his grandfather back like he wishes he could write Louis a poem and remind him where they’re staying, remind him that he still has to draw him his aliens. But they can’t be yellow, they can’t be green. They can’t have little antennas like TV sets.

TV sets.

There’s a TV set in the hotel room.

Dan can’t remember if he noted it down. Like he can’t remember if he told his mother he loved her the last time he saw her and he can’t remember how long it’s been since he shoved his fingers down his throat. He can’t remember what his psychiatrist used to tell him about food and eating disorders, or about how many times you have to say something for people to not feel anything anymore. He shoves his fingers down his throat and makes himself vomit because they told him he could find self-confidence if he emptied himself of everything. And they told him if he cut himself deep enough, maybe he’d find fucking stars in his arms and maybe his father would love him. And maybe Phil Lester wouldn’t want to smoke cigarettes because maybe they could make poems together out of the smudges of blood.

Maybe that’s not what it’s about, but maybe Dan doesn’t remember if he’s ever given a fuck. Their agonies are fucking frolicking over the emptiness of number twelve and Dan’s heart isn’t even in his chest anymore but he’s damned if he expects anybody to put it back for him. Like he’s damned if he expects his husband to tell him he loves him and he’s damned if he expects the shadows bunched in his cornea to make love to shards of light. He’s damned if they leave him alone because Dan Howell is as lonely as a person not alone could ever be.

And what a fucking tragedy.

What a fucking mess.

They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

And they say it’s not enough when Dan’s thin fingers cling to the top of the papery bag, tearing down the sides. The smell is not enough but neither is the taste. And neither are his words because they say number twelve is tired but Dan says it’s just fucking empty, says it’s just fucking shit. And sometimes he wishes he could use words to build friends and he could fall in love with the characters he’s created because then maybe he could tell them his chest feels nice without a heart and he never fucking wants it back. And maybe he could tell them that he’s never found the stars in his arms and Phil Lester has never written words in his blood.

His aliens have never been red.

Dan’s hands are tight around the bag of food and there’s jam smeared on the bread. There’s a cup of something on the coffee table but it’s cold and he doesn’t even remember it. And he wishes, in a twisted sort-of way, he was still just a child. And Phil was just his friend. And they weren’t smoking cigarettes and they weren’t stacking bottles of vodka and they weren’t bringing blades to their arms because God doesn’t like them and he doesn’t want them to feel anything.

Dan wishes they were kids because then they wouldn’t call them insane. His pills would be medicine and he could drink them in a sweet liquid and they wouldn’t make him vomit. His mother would wash his curls in strawberry shampoo and she’d wrap him up in a shitty towel and set him down on the tiles with the bathwater dripping down his back. And his brother would be there, the glass would be foggy. They’d read tales of Winnie and Roo and there’d be a hundred fucking acres but, Jesus, if they wanted a thousand then they’d find a way to get them.

And they wouldn’t be insane.

They’d never be insane.

Because they’d be allowed to wear space pyjamas and they’d be allowed to read Noah’s Ark. And they’d be allowed to bleed onto school jumpers and wear yellow boots through the puddles just as much as they’d be allowed to cry because kids can be cruel, kids have always been cruel. But they’d be allowed to be that too because maybe their fucking parents are drug addicts and maybe their father puts his hands on their mother and maybe the world has just never span the right way, regardless of its fucking pace. Maybe God didn’t paint the summer hot and maybe God didn’t paint the children sad because maybe they never taught him how to paint. 

Like they never taught Van Gogh.

And they never taught Dan Howell.

But they drove him down to a piece of shit hotel with his husband on the windowsill and no food in his stomach and sometimes they call him art but sometimes they don’t call him anything.

And he can’t decide which is worse.

Like he can’t decide if he likes the sunflowers more than the starry night. And he can’t decide if he likes yellow more than he likes blue. And he can’t decide if he likes his heart on the mattress more than he likes it on his sleeve. Because he plucks it off the fabric, and pushes it to the side. And it lays there on the white and bed of fucking nothing and it bleeds so fucking gorgeously, even though his aliens aren’t red. And even though it makes him think of six on a milky morning with the mirror on the bathroom wall and the jumper clinging to his skin. The music, the moment, the forgotten and the noticed. The cherry knots and blood clots and Jesus on his cross. Red for crucifixion, red for French soldiers. Red for sex with somebody else.

And Dan writes _you don’t understand me_ in the nothing and the blood.

And then he writes that dawn is cascading down on us faster than we can say _melancholy_ because the world doesn’t care, the world has never cared. The world cries because it doesn’t care or maybe it just wishes it had a heaven. Maybe it just wishes it could remember why it doesn’t. And maybe it just wishes, in a twisted sort-of way, that it had never been at all. Like God had never been, and Dan had never been. And there had never been seven days of creation. 

And he’s laying there on a thin and shitty mattress in the middle of Paris with his fingers around his breakfast and his husband on the windowsill, smoking away his cigarettes.

And everything is beautiful.

Everything is sad.

And Dan knows it’s the same thing.

He is an artist because he knows it’s the same thing.

He is an artist because his heart is bleeding on the white sheets when he opens the brown bag and eats the bread and jam. The strawberry is sweet, all red and sticky. It’s soft on his throat, softer than red has ever been and he doesn’t think he minds it. Because some people have red aliens, some people have strawberry jam. Some people don’t think about blood on sleeves and emergency rooms for paper cuts, persistence and lipstick stains and the white of the prettiest teeth. Some people don’t think about their mother. Some people don’t think about Mars. Some people have red aliens because red is their favourite colour. It’s apples and roses, a telephone box in the middle of London and a boyfriend on the other line. It’s expensive wine, an excellent grade. It’s jam with bread and butter.

And Dan doesn’t think it’s his place to give a shit why a person would choose red aliens.

Because if your aliens are red, your aliens are red.

And that will never not be okay.

And he’s sitting there with the crumbs on his fingers and the colour in the corner of his mouth. He cleans it off with his thumb and the red soaks through the black, melts in the shade. And it’s funny, he thinks, in a twisted sort-of way. Because he thinks about his mother, but he thinks about her smile. He thinks about her nails. He thinks about her dress. He thinks about the little roses Phil wrote him on the fourteenth of the second month, with the water and the still life and all his pretty poems.

“Phil,” Dan says, and his voice is strange in the air. It’s been a while since he spoke, he thinks. Ten minutes or twenty. An hour of four.

Phil’s tone is hoarse from his cigarettes and he’s drumming his foot against the wall to the music, to The Beatles and their pretty sounds. “Yeah?”

“Stop smoking now,” he tells him. “I ate my breakfast, stop smoking. Write me a poem to make me happy.”

“You ate your breakfast?”

“Yeah, Phil. The bread and the jam. Some people have red aliens, you know?”

Dan watches Phil as he blows rings of smoke against the window, but they’re not fucking golden and he will never know the words to make them so. He will never know the words to make a colour another, a marriage a divorce. He will never know the words to make his husband stop smoking, Louis come back. And he knows that’s really just it.

“People have red aliens, they do,” Phil says. “And they’re allowed that. They can have that. Aliens are pretty, Dan.”

“Aliens are pretty?”

“Yeah, sunshine,” he nods around his cigarette. “Aliens are pretty, even prettier than The Beatles.”

“The Beatles,” Dan glances to the record player and it’s still turning. Over and over. His stomach is answering his breakfast like the bread was a fucking question. “You believe in The Beatles, but you don’t believe in aliens.”

“I don’t. It’s okay. I don’t have to.”

“You don’t, Phil. It’s okay.”

“Van Gogh,” Phil pauses, to breathe smoke into the nothing. “Van Gogh was a nutcase. And Van Gogh had yellow aliens because you told me that. I think you told me that.”

“I think I did, too,” Dan says. “His aliens were yellow because yellow made him happy.”

“Nothing makes me happy,” Phil starts drumming his foot again. Quicker, louder. It’s not in rhythm to the music, if Dan can decipher what the fucking rhythm is. “Is that why I don’t believe? Because nothing makes me happy. No colour, no person. No feeling or state of mind. I am tragedy of the blandest sort. It’s a pity they want to read me.”

“They do want to read you. I ate my breakfast, they do want to read you,” Dan is nodding and his hands are still around the brown bag. He wishes there was more bread, wishes there were more questions. “If they don’t want to read you, Phil, it doesn’t matter. They don’t matter and we don’t matter and these words don’t matter because they’re not reading them. They stopped.”

“They should have,” Phil says. He’s resting his head against the window and his grey shirt is over his thighs. He looks beautiful, but nobody wants to go to war again. “They should have stopped, Dan. Do you think they have? If they haven’t, they need to. If they don’t get it, they need to. Some people just aren’t mad enough.”

“Art is madness, Phil. You told me art is madness. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.”

“Art is madness,” The man echoes. “You know it, you know it already. You don’t need me to tell you. Everyone is sad and art is madness and the world will never stop crying.”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan starts nodding. The record is turning slowly and all the songs are pretty. “You’re right, Phil. If you had aliens, what colour would they be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You do, Phil. What colours would your aliens be?”

“I don’t know, sunshine,” he says, and his eyes are on his hands around his lighter. He’s flicking it on, flicking it off. Over and over and over. “If I knew, I would tell you. So you could write about me and you could write about them. And they wouldn’t care but you’d do it because you make boring things pretty as much as you do sad.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, sunshine. You know you do.”

“And,” There’s still some jam smudged in the corner of his mouth when he smiles, but he doesn’t mind the red. “And you would want me to write about your aliens? You would want me to write about them if you had them?”

“Only you,” Phil tells him. “Only you, because only you could do it. Say that.”

“Say what, Phil?”

“Only you can do it,” Phil repeats.

“Only I could do it,” Dan’s heart is smiling next to him on the sheets because he’s pulled it off his sleeve, pushed it to the side. They told him if he bled enough, he wouldn’t feel a thing. “And if you had aliens, Phil, would you write about them too?”

“No, love. I couldn’t. My aliens belong to you,” he whispers, but Dan hears him through the smoke and music. He hears him through the pretty sounds and the rings of fucking white. The rings he could never make gold, the gold he could never make white. Through the gentle pulses of red and the harder pulses of pain and through the noises in his stomach, the whispers of his shadows. He hears him through it all and he doesn’t even have to try.

Because it’s Phil, and he so listens. He could cut his fucking ear off, and he would still listen.

“Your aliens don’t belong to me, Phil,” Dan tells him. “Your aliens belong to you. _Your_ aliens. And _my_ aliens. And  <>Van Gogh’s aliens, not mine. My aliens aren’t yellow, my aliens aren’t his. They’re not orange like Louis’ or green like Theo’s and they’re not not there, like yours.”

Phil is shaking his head and still flicking at his lighter and he stops so suddenly, clatters down from the windowsill. He walks over to the record player to increase the volume and then he sits down in the middle of the carpet.

“Come sit,” he calls, up over the end of the bed. “I want to sit with you, like we used to do. The world is still crying and we can’t make it stop.”

“I want you to read me a story, Phil,” Dan says, hands tight around the empty brown bag. He wipes his sleeve over his mouth and read smears across the galaxies. Bigger on his shoulders, thinner down his arms. “Why can’t you read me a story?”

“I told you when, you know when,” Phil says. He’s patting his hand over and over on the shitty, off-coloured carpet. And they say insanity is repetition when the point’s already been made. “Come and sit with me, Dan, come and sit with me now. Do it, I told you. Come and sit with me.”

Dan hugs the bag to his chest. “I want you to write me a poem.”

“I’ll write you one, I’ll tell you one. A poem to make you happy. Come and sit with me and we can smoke,” Phil balances the cigarette back into his mouth and Dan wonders if he had the words, he’d write him red or grey. “My baby will be yellow, Dan, but Ella doesn’t want me. And I don’t want my baby.”

“You don’t want your baby,” Dan’s moving across the carpet with the bag still in his arms and he sits himself down, legs crossed before his husband. “You don’t want your baby, Phil, why don’t you want your baby?”

“Because my baby wouldn’t like me,” he says. “And she says I wouldn’t like my baby.”

“But you could write your baby poems, Phil,” Dan reaches forward and takes the man’s lighter and he’s in love with him because he lets him. The flame is off, and Dan starts fiddling with it in his hands. Over and over and The Beatles make pretty sounds. “You told me, you could write it poems. You could use your words to stitch it cardigans and you could take them from the sky.”

And Dan imagines Phil five years down the line, babies and children and a gold band on his finger but no zero and nine. And he imagines him hoisting himself onto a roof, clambering across the slanted bricks and settling under a shitty sky bleeding with everything beautiful. Words blue and words grey, yellow and green and orange. He imagines Phil reaching his pale fingers up and stealing them, to scrawl them down onto a page where they don’t go fucking ignored. And where they know if shit bleeds enough, it doesn’t feel a fucking thing.

“My baby will be yellow, Dan,” Phil says. He’s sitting with his cigarette and his oceans are tired and Dan wonders if he let his work soak in the tide, the ink would run at all. Because God knows he is such a fucking genius that if he wrote his words to bricks of stone, they would never bleed again. And he could use them to say _fuck you_ when they tell him that they don’t get it. And he could use them to say _sometimes, kids, you’re just not mad enough to get it._ “My baby will be yellow and it’ll have yellow aliens but the aliens will be yours, Dan, like mine are too. And like Van Gogh’s are, like Doré’s are. Like Louis’ are and Theo’s are.”

“No, Phil,” Dan says. He flicks at the lighter and the flame ignites and he thinks about the stories, thinks about the road. If Phil died, he would want to die too. “They’re not my aliens, they’re not my—”

“Yes, they are. They’re your aliens, Dan. You don’t get it, you don’t get things. But they are. You made them,” Phil says. He’s patting his hand on the carpet to the sound of the music. “You made them good, you wrote them good. You wrote us good, too.”

“No, Phil,” Dan shakes his head at him and flicks the lighter again. “We wrote us together. Like we smoke together and we come together. Remember? Come Together, we have to listen. I want to listen. Tell me about Noah’s Ark, Phil, tell me about the fire.”

Over and over and over.

One and one and one is three.

“Fire,” Phil echoes. He reaches forward and takes the lighter from Dan, puts it right between them. “We’re carrying the fire.”

“On the road?”

“On the road,” he nods. “In our hearts, to the ocean.”

“And,” Dan’s chest is tight with all the fucking yellow and Van Gogh is painting his heart over on the bed. It’s bleeding, but red is nice. The walls are bleeding and it’s okay because red is nice. Some people have red aliens, some people have strawberry jam. “And we’re gonna get there, ’cause we’re good. We’re good and we’re carrying the fire.”

“Yeah, sunshine. You got it.”

“Tell me about your aliens, Phil,” Dan pleads. “If you had a heaven, what would it be?”

And Dan doesn’t think he knows how to, but if he did he would say _mine is you._ And he would say that it was cigarettes and grey shirts and windowsills. And he would say that it was _stop talking about your heaven_ , but what he would mean is _I really just wish you’d say I was yours._

And he doesn’t know how to tell Phil that sometimes you don’t have to believe in something to believe that it exists. He doesn’t know how to tell the world that, and that’s really just it. Because Dan doesn’t have the words to make a difference, nor will he ever. But if he did, he would use them. And he would tell everyone and everything that you don’t _have_ to believe in heaven to believe a heaven exists. Just like you don’t _have_ to believe in God to believe a God exists. And just like you don’t _have_ to believe in madness to believe a mad man exists. Because thinking one thing does not mean you have to think another and sometimes you can think things that make no fucking sense, but you are damned if you don’t think them.

Think and think hard, Dan thinks, and do not believe in thinking. Because it’s funny, he supposes, in a twisted sort-of way.

If he could explain that thought he just had, he could change the fucking world.

“I don’t have a heaven, Dan,” Phil tells him. “I don’t believe in heaven. No God, no Jesus. Heaven doesn’t exist.”

“But if you had a heaven, Phil,” Dan says. “If you had one, it would be heaven.”

And Phil stares at him over the lighter and the brown bag and The Beatles are there making pretty sounds on a little boat in his ocean eyes.

Dan tells him, “You don’t have a heaven, Phil. So your heaven is heaven. Your heaven is a place where you have a heaven. Thinking one thing doesn’t mean you have to think another. Sometimes you can think things that make no sense but you have to think them, Phil. You have to.”

Phil puts his cigarette to his lips, and blows the smoke across Dan’s senses. “Why do I have to?”

“Because you can write about them then, Phil. And writing is beautiful, even if it makes no sense. Writing is beautiful.”

“It is?”

“Yeah, Phil, yeah. You know that. You told me that,” Dan hugs the brown bag back tight to his chest. “Do you have anymore bread, Phil?”

“Bread? No, sunshine. I didn’t buy no more,” Phil shakes his head. “I didn’t buy no more, I’m sorry.”

“When can you buy more, Phil?” Dan opens the bag and puts his fist in and it’s empty and it’s horrible. It’s horrible because it’s empty. And he thinks about putting his hand so far down his fucking throat that it would be in his stomach and it would be empty, too. It would be horrible, too.

“Soon I can buy more, soon,” Phil is nodding to him when he reaches for the TV remote sitting on the coffee table. “Let’s watch now, Dan.”

Dan turns in his place on the carpet. The window is there, in the corner of his eye. And the shadows are there, too. But he doesn’t think the scene is black anymore than it is grey, and anymore than it is red. He doesn’t think he cares for the colour because he doesn’t think he can write about it, but if he could write about it then it would be beautiful. Because it would make no sense at all.

The little TV is playing pictures of a city, and it looks like Manchester if Dan ever fucking knew it.

There are words on the bottom of the screen.

And there are tears all over the glass.

“Look, Dan,” Phil says. And he crawls over on the carpet and snakes his arm around Dan’s back and he sits there with him, watching, and everything is okay. Everything is okay even though Dan doesn’t believe things can be okay. And he’s damned if he doesn’t think that, like he’s damned if he knows what the fuck is up with Manchester. “It’s that place, Dan, look. That place where we kissed, where I kissed you or—or you kissed me.”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan whispers, and he leans back into the man. He leans back into the man because everything is everything and everything being everything means nothing can just be nothing. And Dan wishes he had the words to make Manchester’s pain go away, like he wishes he had the words to make everyone’s pain go away. Because they say Dan Howell is a little more than psychotic and they say if you try you can see him in Van Gogh, in a twisted sort-of way. They say his words are streaks of paint but he needs to find his yellow and they say he writes because it’s the only shot he’s got at ever finding it.

But they don’t know anything, Dan thinks.

They will never fucking know anything.

Phil says something about the world and Dan wants to tell it that he writes because it’s sad. He wants to tell it that if it wanted, he would write it a poem. He’d write it a poem for when it cries and everything is nothing and it can’t decide what to do. For when the winter is cold and the summer is warm and for when they say that’s just what seasons do. And for when it’s grey and it doesn’t fucking realise that the greatest part of being grey is that you’re not black and you’re not white.

Phil mumbles, “The world is crying, Dan,” and then, “We should smoke some more.”

Dan’s eyes are on Manchester, still and focused. His husband’s arm is around his waist and the touch is rough on his bones. He wonders if he pushed hard enough, his ribs would crack under the force and he’d be heartless and ribless and there’d be gaping areas in his chest like potholes in tarmac. Shit to fill in, or shit to avoid. Manchester is burning and it’s been a while since Dan’s written anything and he thinks maybe it’s all irrelevant but he puts his pen to his skin and he writes _I want to go home_ and hopes it poisons him.

He hopes the friends he left behind bleed as ink under his veins like he hopes the distant memory of the colour of their bikes stains the blue. And he hopes they remember his laces coming undone in the middle of a game of football and the smell of the muddy field in the recent passing of rain, like it’s paint that’s all dried up and can’t remember what colour it was supposed to be. But he hopes they remember what colour he was supposed to be even when he was what he wasn’t and he hopes they breathe his name into conversations of the good old times, conversations of conversations around hot coffees on Saturday mornings and jerseys rumpled in tiny fists. Childhood competitions, bouncy castles and misplaced invites and school plays pushed away into psychological protection. Like _no, no, you can’t touch that_ , like he shoved gas masks over the noses of his favourite memories before the poison bled out of the rotting areas of his mind.

They stood there inhaling amongst the darkness and the death, the peeling wallpaper and the decaying happiness and he performed surgery on the sickness between the ribs of nostalgia. He delivered bad news, was sat in the waiting room, splashed yellow over the white walls and recited poetry in the wards for his grandfather and their card games, his grandmother and her grief and he watched children wheeled down with parents and crossed fingers but even the greatest poet cannot work the word _hope_ from the word _terminal_. He wrote his favourite memories to safety, crammed as many as he could into lifeboats and sent them sailing back home on the sea of _you will never be happy again._

There’s somebody knocking on the door of the hotel room in Paris and Phil’s holding a bottle of alcohol, running his thumbs down its neck like he’s trying to find the perfect place to squeeze. Dan thinks _murder_ and thinks of them chanting it up the street.

_Murder, murder, murder._

They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

And they say you can’t tell a sane man from an insane one if they both look the same.

Because it’s like trying to tell red from blue, like trying to tell yellow from orange.

Phil moves his leg from around Dan and carries the bottle over to the door. He stands there for a moment and Dan stares at the edges of his grey shirt hanging down to his thighs. He looks like he used to in the white hours of weekend mornings, when they smoked over breakfast and ate over cigarettes and their lips were red with jam and strawberry kisses and Phil would lift him up onto the countertop just to stand between his legs. And the tender puffs of breath, the fingers over the nape of his neck and the _love you, love you always_ because _always_ only always means _right now._ Synonymous with the simplicity of the current situation, never stretching its letters out over rocky patches of toxic relationships. It’s not _always_ when it’s _never_ and never _never_ when it’s _always_ and they said they’d love forever when forever was a moment. The strawberry kisses, the touches over the lines indented in palms. The pyjamas riding up hot stomachs, the mouths moving up thin thighs and the music in the intervals, the knuckles and the joints and the splashes of cash from the bestselling novel. The taste of eighteen years before Manchester burned to the ground, before they lit matches of _never_ to know forever was only ever just a moment.

Forever is only ever a moment.

Since Dan didn’t say _forever_ when he cut too far into his arms. And Phil didn’t say _forever_ when they called him an alcoholic, called him out for soaking his existence in syrup and liquor.

“Who is it, Phil?” Dan says. He’s got his hand back in the empty brown bag. “Who is it?”

Phil is shaking his head and smiling when he lifts his own hand and knocks back on the closed door. Dan laughs because it’s fucking funny and it’s fucking stupid and he’s fucking mad. Mad like the hatter, mad like Alice. Mad like wonderland and mad like _you must be mad, or you wouldn’t be here._

Mad like knocking on a closed door as if responding to the stranger on the other side, made stranger by the fact they’re probably not even there.

“Answer it, Phil, answer the door,” Dan tells him. He hugs his knees to his chest and his arms are tight around the bones. “Pull it open, use the handle. We have friends.”

“We don’t have friends,” Phil says. “No friends.”

“We don’t not have something just because we don’t want it, Phil.”

“Shush now, shush,” Phil hushes him, waves his hand absently and pushes his ear to the wood. He knocks back again, and there’s a thud against the bottom of the door.

“You better let me the fuck in, Phil, or God help me!”

Orange pours out of the cracks in Dan’s head like the man’s voice has pulled a switch and the colour is flooding out. The aliens, the cigarettes, the gentle hands. Louis, Louis, Louis. Dan doesn’t know how long it’s been but it feels like one too many chapters, one two many sentences. It feels like all the nights he wrote himself back to his old friends and they didn’t remember his name, didn’t look at him in the corridors and didn’t acknowledge the fact that he had a chest still stuttering and a heart still pumping. Because it hurts to hear Louis’ voice but in the same way Dan imagines it would hurt Van Gogh to think he’s dipped his brush in yellow paint, only to realise it’s orange.

And then to realise there’s nobody there to ask the difference between yellow and orange and to ask the difference between one ear and two. Between painting and writing, bluebirds and dragonflies and poppies and butterflies.

“It’s Louis, Phil, it’s Louis,” Dan gets up from the carpet and patters across to the door, but Phil’s there to yank him back before he can grasp the handle.

And the touch burns on his upper arms, feels like his fingers are pokers or maybe they’re razors and they’re slicing through the skin. Making Dan’s limbs look like roots, like they’re spurting out from under shrubs and trees and sunflowers. The gift that keeps on giving, the boy that keeps on taking.

And _holy fuck, just let it go_ , how pretentious and how shameful it is to see Van Gogh taking the stars from his night and using them over the rhône.

What a fucking tragedy.

What a fucking mess.

“Louis—Louis, you came back,” Dan’s clinging to the cotton of the man’s shirt in the hotel hallway. A door he managed to open and a husband he managed to push away. Friends to lovers and lovers to friends since ‘friends’ works better than strings of messy thoughts, sequences of _I hope you understand me_ between _always_ and _never._

The sunset is there on Louis’ skin, soaking in his careful touch on Dan’s body.

“The fuck is happening here?” he asks Phil. “Are you taking care of him? Is he—Have you been drinking again? You need to give me that bottle—”

“Fuck off,” Phil growls, and Dan stands back into the space between the men. He starts rocking back on his heels and counting words on his fingers. “We don’t want you, we don’t need you. My bottle, my drink. I don’t share, sharing is shitty. Tell him, Dan, tell him it’s shitty. I’m gonna write a poem for my baby, even though Ella says I can’t see it.”

“You can’t see your child?” Louis shuts the hotel door and stands there in the entrance. “What happened? Why are you talking like that?”

“I can’t see my baby, Louis. And Dan and I kissed in Manchester but now it’s burning to the ground and it feels like a poem, don’t you think so?”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan interrupts with excited eyes. “A poem, yeah. You wrote me a poem.”

Matches ignited over sheets of paper, handwritten and recalling days spent in shopping centres with milkshakes sloshing in tummies and tasting like strawberry, tasting like pink for nail polish and pyjamas and _we’ll write until it doesn’t make us happy anymore._ So it’s burning the sound of the kettle in the middle of the night because they’re busy writing, busy working, mugs of tea and mugs of coffee and quick kisses down throats just to remind themselves what the other tastes like so you can note it down. Manchester is burning and it’s a shitty fucking poem but Phil’s never been too good of a poet and even if he was, he’d find a way to set fire to it.

Flicked lighters.

Hearts on fire.

Louis says, “Motherfucker, what kind-of air do you guys _breathe_? You can’t be cooped up in here, it’s not healthy. You’re both fucking ill and this room, this situation, it isn’t helping your states. You need to shower and change and eat this food I bought you—”

“You bought some food, Louis?” Dan says. “You bought food, can I see? Can I have it?”

“Yeah, I—I bought food, yeah. Here you go, buddy,” Louis passes Dan a bag of sugary treats. “You’re feeling a little better right now, huh?”

“He’s eating, he’s eating more. Look, Louis, he wants to eat,” Phil says, as Dan starts tearing open the bag to retrieve the food.

“Stop, Phil,” Louis dismisses him. “Don’t draw attention and, for the love of God, don’t fucking smoke anymore. You reek of cigarettes.”

“I like cigarettes. You do, too. We can have some, we can—We can drink now, Louis,” Phil holds the bottle in his hand up. “Drink for Dan and his food. For Dan, my Dan.”

“Your Dan?”

“Did you draw me my aliens yet?” Dan asks him, around a mouthful of sugar. “You said you would, you told me. Your apartment is lovely, Louis, I think it’s lovely. You live here in Paris but you said you’d take me to Arles. When can we go there?”

“Soon, buddy,” Louis smiles and rubs his arm. “We can go soon, I promise.”

“Soon,” Dan echoes. “Soon, Phil. Everybody says soon, everybody says it even though they should say never. Never, ever. People should tell the truth.”

“People do tell the truth, Dan. Who doesn’t tell the truth?”

“Manchester, Louis,” Dan nods over at the TV screen. “Look at Manchester, it’s burning. All those news reports and sad children. I wish the children weren’t sad. I wish I was a better writer.”

And Dan’s stood there with a kind man and an unstable alcoholic in a hotel room he can’t be sure is in Paris, just like he can’t be sure he’s in heaven. He could write himself to Amsterdam now, write himself to Mars because some people have red fucking aliens and some people have a tendency of trying to make sense of shit that just doesn’t make sense. A tendency of ignoring the very facts on the page before them, and Dan knows equations are complicated but he’s written them in their simplest form. Written them word for word, written them firm and definite. He is the character and the author, the artist and the mad man and the child and the adult. He is Theo and he is Louis. He is Phil, he is their marriage. He is fiction and non, a fan and a protagonist like Shakespeare was Romeo and Shakespeare was Juliet. 

Dan is as insane as the one who gets it and insane as the one who doesn’t. The understanding and the confusion, the subtlety and the genius. He’s writing a love episodic, subject to criticism and pushing shit too far and _I am awfully sorry if I offended you, I am awfully sorry if I’ve been gone too long._

Dan realises he can use his position to say whatever the fuck he likes. So he uses it to say _I do hope you’re having fun_ and he uses it to manipulate the art of psychological writing and making a person aware of their existence as much as he makes them aware of the fact they’re a character in a story. And he’s as insane as a sane man, so he can say whatever he pleases before they wrap his wrists and they tie him down. And on the other side too, because the other side is the same. On the other side, there’s a Van Gogh and there’s probably a Louis and probably a Theo and there’s most definitely a cynical addict who thinks they’re a decent writer in the process of thinking they’re the worst to ever attempt it. 

On the other side, Dan is insecure. He’s bruised and broken, purple and red but often blue and he thinks about thinking more often than he doesn’t. He uses fiction to mask the reality of the situation and he’s the first writer who writes about the writer but uses friends constructed of plot lines and character development to tell his story for him. Because on the other side, his best friend is a star and he is Van Gogh. His best friend is Alice and he is Lewis Carroll, therefore his best friend his himself. And he’s coming back to his hotel room—his crazy persona and his possibly crazy husband—to dare the world to peer through the looking glass that separates illusion and reality.

On the other side, he is the same.

On the other side, he’s got a friend who sends him tales constructed of subtle sadness because it’s all about reciprocation. He’s got a friend he spends evenings scrawling poems for, rhymes littered with frosted lakes and better times and he sees Louis and he sees Theo, sees religion and atheism and _keep up, keep up_ because Manchester is burning and it’s the eighteenth year and they’ve just taken speed, some shots of the shit they can spit back out if things get too quick and the feelings blow the lid and Dan is too busy rhyming about his friend to rhyme about the story. Paris and Arles and London. Places to represent emotion. 

They’ve got a trip around Europe and hearts separated by gaping oceans, and Dan wishes he could make a little more sense like he wishes he knew the art of ‘giving it a go.’ He wishes he knew the art of _I’m so fucking proud of you for trying, you shit_ and he wishes he knew the art of Van Gogh killing himself, knowing he’d never be able to paint again. Because the only reason Dan hasn’t put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger is because he wouldn’t be able to write about it. And his words are like therapy, like hugs to kids who slash their wrists because God doesn’t know how to treat them right.

And Louis is there in the hotel room to sit with the maniac and his husband and watch the news as it rolls in, watch the coverage on the terribly weak metaphor it’s probably too simple to understand.

Like the simplest things always are.

Some people have red aliens, some people have a heaven.

Some days food tastes nice and some days two fingers are the better alternative.

Some things are simple and some things are not and nobody but Van Gogh taught Van Gogh how to paint, like nobody but Dan Howell taught Dan Howell how to write. 

And it doesn’t often matter what it means.

That’s the simplest thing of all.

But Dan wishes he didn’t care about the world like it doesn’t care about him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, hello. I’ve been gone for a little but I’m back. Still, I’m not sure if regularly. This story is a hell of a challenge for me, particularly with all the emotions and sickness. It puts a strain on a lot. Anyway, I’m sorry the update is so much later. Sometimes shit happens and sometimes we have to take time out. Sometimes “the author is the character” and sometimes they’re very dramatic but sometimes they really do struggle. I use Dan often to represent me and I think I wanted to have his character acknowledge the fact that I represent him, too.
> 
> Thanks for being patient, fam. Thanks, for future reference too. If you didn’t understand half of this chapter, I’m sorry I’m so disastrously pretentious and I don’t know when to stop lol. It was awfully written, I know. I thought it’d turn out good but no, surprise. I’m trying hard to make my thoughts creative, since I build my life on that. Also, thanks so much to the friend I managed to poetically mention here. You know who you are x


	13. Loulike

**number thirteen: loulike**

_Dan_ has his head on somebody’s knees when he wakes up. His coherency comes in little snippets, strips of paper and splashes of glue he’s used unsteady fingers to merge into the paper maché titled _memory._ The little creation, the shit that looks like a disaster and looks like what they stick to their display boards in school because they feel fucking sorry for you.

And Dan struggles, in the beginning, to find all the pieces. Because his floor is littered with jigsaws, littered with their fragments, and he doesn’t know which ones fit into which box, or which words work best in which sentence. And if he had a pen, he’d write himself back home with his mother so he could scurry off to the bathroom and force metal under his skin. So he could bleed on the tiles and then curse himself out when there’s only a white towel, when he has to take his shirt off and mop up the mess like his insides are the sun, clinging to the black material. He’d write himself back home because at home, he was never numb. At home, he had a depressed mother and a father he didn’t like to mention because every time he did, the medicine cupboard would slam. Every time he did, his mother’s voice grew weaker and sentences longer. As if somebody had placed weights at each end, one over the capital letter and the other over the full stop and she’d speak like she didn’t know the start from the end.

At school when they gave Dan some paper and a pen and told him to write about his favourite things, he wrote _this paper_ and _this pen._ He wrote _a question directed at me_ and _my house before the war_ and _the money for two tickets to the school production._ He wrote something horizontally because the lines were vertically, and because he liked the direction his mother patterned the shit on her wrists and he liked the way the blue of her veins looked between the streaks of her red. He liked it when she cried because often it meant he could touch his tiny fingers to the worn edges of her hair and he could tell her that it didn’t matter, tell her she had no reason to be frightened. He could lay with her in her bed and trace crossroads over the back of her hand. He could work a naive voice into the sheets of silence and peek at her from between them even though the pillows took advantage of the delicacy in her smile, always and forever eating it alive. Her lips would stitch into the layer of fabric and he’d watch her nose brush the surface, feel her breath over his eyelids as she told him, “I want a story, Dan. Tell me one of your stories.”

And so he liked it when his mother cried because she didn’t seem to mind about the characters with the funny names, about the places he pronounced incorrectly and the little details he forgot to wind together. She didn’t mind because Dan was eleven years old and his skies were frequently purple, plots frequently peculiar. He narrated tales of sleeping dragons and whispered passages of brave knights, uttered syllable after syllable of demigods and mortals, gorgons and labyrinths and _it’s a little like Don Quixote, mom, you know Don Quixote._

And his mother would say, “I know it, love. It’s your favourite, I know it. Carry on now.”

And so Dan would carry on. Now and then, past and present. If he had a pen, he’d write his mother’s name. And he’d write the way she looked when she was having none of ‘the family shit’, the way she yelled when she threw Dan’s notebooks out with the trash because he was writing _your_ and _fucking_ and _fault._ He was writing himself ammunition to fight his father’s corner, using red pen and violent words and she wanted to ink _fuck you_ back but her fingers were shaking too much.

Out of pills, out of love. 

Dan’s thinking about his mother when he creates the fucking jigsaw and sits up on the bed. Paris. Arles. A hotel room with four walls and a silence knotted into the air likes nerves into a stomach.

“Dan,” It’s Louis, Dan hears. He’s sat there looking sad and withered, looking like somebody has dragged their hands through orange paint and rinsed him out. Like his mother would do with dishcloths on weekday mornings, all the sink water running out and tickling up her sleeves. Wrong angles, misjudged positions. Louis says, “Hey, Dan, hey.”

There’s light leaking in through the open glass of the window, seeping down the atmosphere’s trenches that are soggy with filthy anguish. Dan stares at Louis sitting with him on the mattress and he thinks about Van Gogh, thinks about whether or not his art made it onto a display when he was a student and whether or not he believes we can love more than we can miss.

Whether or not he’d cry if Dan’s heart never made it back into his chest.

“What’s happening, Louis?” Dan whispers, strained and hoarse. His throat is tight around the food resting there, sugary and desperate to see the surface of his tongue and the back of his teeth. “My head is messy, my head is—I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know what’s happening. I feel sick, Louis, I-I need to be sick.”

“No, shh, hold on,” Louis’ got his arm around Dan’s waist and the nothing is screaming through the everything. The record isn’t turning, the TV is off. Somewhere there’s static, faltering in the quiet, and somewhere there's a gravestone for Dan’s grandfather just like somewhere there’s a deck of cards in a dusty drawer, old and overused but not touched anymore. Dan’s head is aching through rushes of vertigo and if he had a pen, he’d write nothing because there’d be nothing in the pen. Nothing in his brain, nothing in the room. He scratches his bitten nails down his arms and smacks his fists into his thighs, thinks of Manchester burning to the ground and Arles being too far away and _fuck this, how do I write myself home?_

“Louis, I—” Dan is crying and he doesn’t know why. It’s been a while since he cried, a while since he felt a pain nudging like knuckles under his ribs rather than settling in his heart. It’s been a while since he cried and didn’t know why, but knew there was a reason. He’s a writer and he can’t conjure the correct words to describe what it feels like to know something is there and not know what it is. Dan is terrified of the dark because something is there and he doesn’t know what it is. And he’s cold and he’s lonely, tired and apologetic and he wishes he could make people happy in the same way they try to make him happy. Because he’d quite like to write about what it feels like to stitch a smile across somebody’s face, to love them in a way only a person who doesn’t often love can.

“Why are you crying, Dan?” Louis asks him, and he has both of his arms around the scrawny man now. They’re sitting there on the mattress, on the shitty bed in the middle of Paris and everything is okay but everything also isn’t. Dan can’t remember the things he’s said, the person he’s supposed to be. He can’t remember what shirt Phil was wearing in Manchester’s fucking station and he can’t remember what train he caught, what time he arrived. He can’t remember whether he stayed with Phil and his family for two days or three and—if Dan Howell scratches the romanticism and the bullshit character he’s developed—he can’t even really remember what Phil’s mouth tasted like when they kissed for the first time. But that fact is hushed, Dan knows, behind pretty words and exaggerated passages. Behind things he’s said just because he knows they’ll call them poetic and he knows being poetic is the definition of being a poet. So he’s written nice things, said lovely things. Roses in glass vases, kisses on each knuckle and tables cluttered with white, white, white in the centre of a wedding ceremony.

Days home sick from school.

Phil’s tongue tasting of strawberry or cinnamon or peppermint and his palms so rough around smaller hands.

His back on a mattress, his eyes on a ceiling.

His fingers through curly hair and his voice through miserable afternoons and his _love you_ and his _always_ through the tired head of an insecure teenager who won’t often admit to the fact that all he wants is somebody to say sorry to him. All he wants is consideration and compassion and he’s written nice things, said lovely things, with pretty memories down his arms and ghosts of fingers between his fingers.

But the truth is hushed and Dan figures it wouldn’t be the truth if it wasn’t. So he takes the voice he doesn’t use often but the one others use theirs to attack and he whispers, “I can’t remember if I’ve ever been okay. Everything hurts and I can’t remember. I-I’m crying, Louis, I’m crying and everything hurts. Can you see that it hurts? Can you s-see when I hurt? Can they see? Can Phil see? Phil, where’s Phil?”

“Shh, he’s just sleeping,” Louis starts shaking his head. “Leave him be, buddy, let him be—”

“H-He said he was going to write me a poem, Louis,” Dan starts looking around the room and he’s clinging to Louis’ shirt because he’s terrified of the night and he’s terrified of what’s in it and he’s terrified of Phil. He’s terrified of Phil because Phil’s laying on the other bed, slumped down on a pillow. The curtains are moving in the wind and there’s a bottle on his bedside, a grey shirt riding up his stomach. Dan remembers nothing but The Beatles and the packets of cigarettes and the road and the fire and the days in which they fucked off to Paris and wrote themselves under milky skies. The days in which they were not content in letting nothing be nothing, letting words be words and pain be pain. Dan isn’t content in letting an alcoholic be an alcoholic, like he assumes the alcoholic isn’t content in letting a lunatic be a lunatic and so he tries to shuffle off the end of the bed towards his husband but—

But Louis holds him gently in place and murmurs, “No, Dan, hey. You have to leave him, he drank a lot and he needs to sleep. He’s sad but it’s okay, buddy, because so are you. And you’re confused, yeah? You’re scared and confused. Do you not remember some things? Tell me what you don’t remember, tell me where the static is.”

“The static i-is everywhere, Louis,” Dan is whimpering now and he keeps watching the door for his mother, keeps feeling his stomach for his food. “I can’t remember anything a-and Phil is having a child but he isn’t allowed to see it. It’s a b-baby, Louis, a real one. Proper one. Little bumps and tiny fingers. It’s going to wear blue c-cardigans and Phil is going to sing it lullabies he wrote because he writes a lot and he’s a writer. He’s a writer, Louis, he used to be. He was so good, my favourite. He doesn’t like me and my mom doesn’t like me a-and you said you’d take me to Arles and I don’t remember going to sleep and—”

“You fell asleep, buddy, you feel asleep right here because you were so tired,” Louis moves the hair from Dan’s face that’s tickling past his eyebrow and Dan thinks of his grandmother, thinks of her fingertips. Thinks of her stood in her kitchen, whisking and baking and with her hand around the side of the living-room door, peeking her head around the corner and offering goods. He thinks of her laying comforters down on the sofa-bed when he slept over because his parents were out for the night and his brother was so little breathing beside him, curled up with the bedsheets between both of his knees. And then there was that power-cut, that time the light shuddered and faltered and burst and Dan’s heart pumped through fear and _it’s okay, it’ll be okay, it’s just a bit of darkness._

But he’s in Paris now, he’s in Paris with Louis. They’re on a single mattress and everything is orange and Dan says, “He shouldn’t d-drink, Louis. Phil, Phil, he shouldn’t—Lou, my Phil shouldn’t drink.”

“I know, buddy, I know he shouldn’t,” Louis says. “It’s not important right now, not important what happened. He’s sad and you’re sad. He’s sleeping and you did for a little and that’s good, yeah? Yeah. Were you dreaming, buddy? Do you remember your dreams?”

And Dan realises that he doesn’t have the mentality to decipher between what he dreamt and what he didn’t. So he starts looking around the room, searching for all these clues and he finds Phil’s book on the floor and a lighter at its side and he thinks _fire, fire, fire._ He thinks of bringing the lighter to the pages and watching them burn and it comes so slowly, settles so hastily. The anger smoulders in his chest and there’s no heart to burn, no organ to destroy, so he’s just left with a gaping hole that the wind can channel its whispers through and flit between the pages until they’re caught in the breeze. Dan Howell is a novel—Phil Lester’s novel—and he forces himself down from the bed to crawl across the carpet and retrieve the book and lighter.

And then he flicks at the flame a couple times and Louis doesn’t do anything, Louis doesn’t do anything at all. Dan’s mind is hushed in reminding him of the time he was in the man’s apartment and he swore he’d set fire to the black and the white. He swore he’d give his pain a stage and an audience and he’d watch it dance with little trails of orange across everything that’s ever mocked it, everything that’s ever barricaded the one-way-street to emotional paralysis. Like he swore he’d kick the shit out of sentiment and he swore he wouldn’t stop until it was walking through his head on crutches, crippled by the constant confrontation with itself.

Colloquially crazed, a capsized consciousness creating concussions and _could you lay me to cry in the catacombs of mind?_

Something happens, and Louis passes Dan his pen. It’s better than the lighter, he probably thinks. Safer, weaker. But Dan Howell could do more damage with a pen than he ever could with a lighter, ever could with a loaded gun and a machete tucked up his sleeve like his mother with the dirty dishwater. His pen is his weapon and his pen is his friend.

He can write teenage boys to suicide, teenage girls to prostitution. He can write fairytales of cannibalism and build schizos of children, litter the world with men dragging their left legs slower than their right with mangled insides and mutilated limbs and he’s climbing over classic novelists and shitty romantics with murder in his veins because _does it look like I give a shit what I have to say to make you listen?_

The pen is the sword if the man wants it to be.

It’s the medication and the ecstasy, the agony and the therapy and the blade and the towel and the mother and the father and the brother and the other and the ride down to Arles, the flight down to Paris. The Louis and the Theo. The Dan and the Phil. The words just spoken and the words coming now, over and over and _watch how I play with language, watch how I personify these letters._ They’re soldiers lined up on a sheet of paper just as much as they’re citizens, victims of war and of plastic politicians with false teeth and false gullets and false voice boxes coughing up bullshit all over an infected nation. These letters are yours, these letters are Dan’s and these letters are whatever your head wants them to be because a pen is powerful enough to depict anything you tell it to. Anything you make it. Dan wants a murder, he gets a murder. He wants a dead father, he gets a dead father. He wants a memory, he gets a memory and he wants a monologue, he gets a monologue.

He opens Phil’s book with angry fingers and he pops the cap on his pen and he writes four words on four pages with tears on the back of his hand and Louis’ eyes on the back of his head. And then he rips the pages out of the piece of shit faster than his mind can come stumbling behind, dragging suitcases packed full of the hours they lay reading passages from its insides and the hours they lay working on the accuracy of the plot line.

Astronomy, France, pyjamas.

“Dan, stop it—Dan, buddy, you can’t do that,” Louis comes to take the pen and the book from Dan’s hands, but the pages are already scattered over his lap as if they’re the blood he lost when he cut too deep. Heavy, inked with words. He’s weighted with sadness and terribly bleak stories and so he grins through a sob and thinks _I’ve been through hell, lighten the fuck up and play me that laughing track._

He says, “L-Louis, look, I wrote on his book—I wrote on it and it’s funny, Louis, it’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Come on, buddy,” Louis has discarded the book onto the bed and he hooks his hands under Dan’s arms to force him back onto his feet. He stumbles with the sheets of paper between his fingers, the black words bold over the story. Stumbles and thinks and laughs and cries and Phil is sleeping with alcohol in his blood, with his work in Dan’s hands. And if Louis wasn’t standing like a motherfucking rampart before him, he’d go and write his comedic nihilism all over the man’s skin. “Come on, Dan, we can—Let’s go out for a little, yeah? Put those pages down for me, I’ll take you out into the city.”

“Hey, Lou,” Dan chokes a giggle. “That rhymed, it rhymed. You’re a poet, we’re both poets. Can you write me a poem?”

“Put the pages down, lovely boy,” Louis’ hands are gentle around Dan’s and he slips his fingers around the edges of the paper. “There you go, see? Shh, now, we should be quieter. Come sit and put your shoes on and we can go into Paris.”

“We’re a-already _in_ Paris, Louis,” Dan sobs and sits down on the end of the bed. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “Look at what I d-did to his story, Lou, look at what I wrote. I used his art for my art and he—he married me because he loves me, he u-used to love me. Wake him up and ask him, Louis. Do it right now. Look at what I wrote.”

“What did you write?” Louis is kneeling to slide Dan’s trainers onto his feet and Dan is thinking about his mother, Dan is thinking about his friends and Dan is thinking about the people he’d include in his heaven if he decided his heaven included anyone at all.

He reaches for the pages and holds them up to Louis and Louis reads:

“ _Stop writing about me_.”

Dan says, “He keeps doing it, Lou. I sold a million copies, not him. I was the million copies.”

“You’re not making a lot of sense,” Louis whispers, his fingers wrapped up in the laces. And he’s Dan’s father in that moment, Dan’s father or Dan’s mother or Dan’s father’s father before he was diagnosed. Before his mind started to ache, his brain started to rot. Before his life became a succession of question, answer, same question, same answer and God wrote _dementia_ into the lines between his forehead like the creases across the packs of cards. But God is the shittiest author of them all and God is the one Dan hates the most, the one with the grey skies a little too black and the one with the calm and confident maniacs and the one with the yackety-yak about hope and faith and principles.

He writes writers writing with excellency from passionate to empty, from cramped heads to vacancy and to nothing and to nothing and to nothing. And he wrote Dan’s grandfather to a death lonely and confusing in the same way he wrote Dan to cocaine, to hands on stoves and mouths underwater and he drove a fence with electric words between them and dared them to touch it. 

“I’m s-sorry that I don’t make sense, Louis,” Dan is crying and the sleeves of his pyjamas are damp. Louis has tied his laces and he’s standing before him, so orange and so soft and Phil’s tongue would taste like vodka if Dan moved and forced their mouths together. “N-Nobody would cry if I died, and I don’t make sense.”

“People would cry,” Louis tells him. “Get up now, buddy, people would cry and we’re going into the city.”

“My m-mom doesn’t love me no more, Lou—”

“She doesn’t?” Louis’ voice is a whisper, as he leads towards the door with gentle hands. Dan has left the pages on the mattress, the _stop writing about me_ on the messy sheets.

He doesn’t care.

Van Gogh used to yellow paint because it made him happy.

“She doesn’t, Louis, she n-never calls and she came to visit and she told me I-I had to eat but I have to b-be sick and I have to—” Dan stops with his weak muscles tensing and runs his fingertips along the cracks in his lips, dips them forward inside his mouth and touches his gums. Damp and warm and childish and sad and sick and sick and _bulimia, bulimia—_

_Your writing would be so much better if you stopped drawing fucking tragedy from fucking simplicity._

Dan moves his hands and wraps his hair up in his fingers, pulls on the strands and forces a scream out of his mind. And they insanity is frightening like a bloodstain is orange if you wash it three or four times.

“Come on, Dan, you’re doing so well,” They’re standing in the doorway of the room when Louis wraps his arm around the man and holds him to his body. Dan’s thin fingers cling to his shirt and if he knew it wouldn’t hurt, he’d slip them between his ribs to crack them open and bury himself in his chest. “I’ll show you the city, I’ll take you to a little place—”

“My mom d-doesn’t _love_ me, Louis—”

“It’s okay, buddy, it’s okay,” Louis shuts the door on them softly in the hallway and holds Dan there, his arm balancing faintly on his prominent hip. He has a bag on his back and smoke on his clothes and he says, “My mom doesn’t love me either, you know? My mom doesn’t love me either. Sometimes people don’t have enough room and that hurts a lot, I know it hurts a lot. Let’s just go and find that little place, let me show you it. Come on.”

And so Dan’s got his hand in Louis’ and they’re walking on steady feet out of the hotel, stairs and fingers and space pyjamas on broken backs with bigger galaxies on frailer shoulders. 

It’s late out, dark. The air is muggy and the sky isn’t crying, Theo is gone but he still believes in God. And Paris is Paris, but Dan’s Paris is everything but. See, Dan’s Paris is a little boy with faith in his blood like his parents smudged it into the dimples at the bottom of his back and poured its water over his hair. His Paris is the knowledge that there’ll come a time he won’t believe in anything at all and he’ll put a glass of something sweet to his lips just to be intoxicated enough to tell God to fuck himself. His Paris is Theo, but his Paris is Louis too. Is the sun before it sets and never a moment before and is a ride from an airport, a touch over a spine. Sugary treats in brown bags and the best in the worst, the cigarette in the packet and the painting on the wall.

Dan’s Paris is Van Gogh and Dan’s Paris is his prisoners and Dan’s Paris is his favourite colour. It’s Arles, it’s sunflowers. It’s the view from an asylum window and a café terrace at night and a wind-beaten tree. It’s Dan’s husband and Dan’s lover, his grey shirts and his sweet remedies and his poems he’ll write soon. His hands, his shoulders, his mouth. The Beatles and pages torn from a novel, a staticky TV and pink elephants and _heaven doesn’t exist, Dan, heaven doesn’t exist._ But Dan’s Paris is heaven and his heaven is Paris and if he didn’t live another day, then he isn’t sure he’d know he’d died. 

Because nothing would change.

Because it would be Phil and it would be Louis and it would be Theo. And things would hurt a little mess maybe, and there’d be more pens maybe. But things would be just as beautiful, just as melancholic. Colours and art and friends and children.

They’re in Paris and it’s late and they’re walking down a street and there’s a little flowerbed far beneath the balcony of a flat. And Louis stops to bend down, his hand still tight around Dan’s.

“Look, buddy,” he says, and stands back up. Dan wonders what he has in his bag and then wonders if it’s the same as what he has in his head. “A sunflower, look. A sunflower.”

He’s picked one for Dan, yellow and delightful. The leaves are green like Theo and they’re attached to the yellow petals like Vincent.

“Is it for me?” Dan says, and it’s hoarse and sad. His fingers are shaking and there’s a ringing in his ears, off somewhere distant but loud between each side of his skull. And he tries to silence it, tries to push it down. But it’s like those games of piñata he played at his friends’ birthdays and he always missed his shot.

“Yeah, buddy, you can have it. It’s for you,” Louis hands him the flower and Dan takes it carefully. He holds it there between his fingers and a little girl passes with pink shoes and pink socks and pink clothes. She’s holding a woman’s hand and Dan’s writing himself a story so he says it’s her mother, says they’re dodging the cracks in the sidewalk like they dodged the cracks in a broken family.

“Thank you, Louis. Sunflowers are beautiful. Yellow and sunshine and Van Gogh.”

“Yeah,” Louis smiles. The sun before it sets and not a moment before. “Sunflowers were his favourite. He painted them and wrote about them to Theo. He loved Theo. Do you write about sunflowers too, Dan?”

“Yeah,” Dan tells him. “All the time, Lou, all the time. My Paris is sunflowers just like my Paris is you. What’s your Paris?”

“My Paris?”

“Yeah, Lou.”

“My Paris is—Well, my Paris is—” The man peers around the street and the little girl is gone, the tiny bars are open. There are men on the curbs and smoke in the air and blue and red and purple. “I don’t know, Dan. My Paris is home.”

“Is your Paris your mom, Louis?” Dan asks him. He’s still holding the sunflower and there are still galaxies down his arms and he wonders if Van Gogh would paint him if he could, or if he’d tell him there was nothing to paint. Tell him everything had already been painted. “My Paris isn’t my mom, my Paris isn’t with her. My Paris is heaven, Lou, and I can’t remember if she believes in heaven.”

“Do you believe in heaven?”

Dan stares at the man. A bloodstain is orange if you wash it three or four times. “I don’t know, Lou. My heaven is heaven, my heaven is Paris. Because Paris is Arles and Paris is you. It’s orange for the sunset and green for the other side and yellow for happiness and red for the soldiers. It’s Phil, my Phil, and Gauguin and Doré and Noah’s Ark. It’s aliens and refrains and my friends who don’t think about me anymore and my grandfather before he forgot how to tie my laces, before he forgot how to say my name. It’s a thousand Shakespeare verses and a maths test with all the answers and this sunflower, your ribcage. Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Van Gogh’s starry nights. It’s vocabulary small enough to eat but big enough to make me choke and it’s the trees at the bottom of my garden before my dad cut them down, before he used skin and bone to break everything in the places we can’t reach to fix. Before I got high in his name and he sold the books on my shelf and he pushed a bottle of pills under my mother’s nose when she asked him for a kiss. Before he left, before she cried. My Paris is a nervous phone call on a Friday night and somebody who notices your sadness in the way you type and my Paris is my heaven and my heaven is alright. Alright, Lou, just alright.”

And Louis just stands there with his hands around the straps on his bag and he’s smiling but he’s not and he’s emotional but he’s not and Dan knows he puts his arm around him and carries on down the street because he doesn’t know what the fuck to say. The delusion comes flooding back and seeps into the lines, all vulnerable and white but Dan doesn’t care because he’s said enough. He doesn’t care because he’s cared enough.

“This used to be a record store, you know?” Louis says, with his hand waving towards an old shop. It’s closed and vacant, the windows barred and the shutters down. “My brother used to bring me on a Saturday after footie practise because his best friend’s father owned it.”

”Was it pretty inside, Lou?” Dan says.

“It was pretty, of course. Pretty and cluttered and my brother’s friend, Ames, he used play me a song whenever I asked for one. I drank coffee and sometimes they mixed it with cream and alcohol and it was so lovely, so warm,” Louis still has his hand on Dan’s hip and his eyes on the store and Dan wants to tell him that he thinks they’d have been friends as kids, thinks they’d have played together on weekends and drank coffee with guitars in record stores. “I used to sit on the counter and chat to the customers about the records. Sometimes I’d play a game, predict what they’d buy when they walked in.”

“That’s funny, Lou,” Dan’s smiling and grinning and he’s yellow where he’s often blue, yellow where he should be red.

“Funny, yeah,” Louis’ smiling, too. “It was great, so great. Ames was great and my brother, too. Do you have a brother, buddy?”

“Yeah,” Dan says. “Little one. Littler. I haven’t seen him for so long, it’s been so long. I miss him, Lou, like you miss your brother. And you miss the store.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Louis turns back to it. “I miss the counter and I miss the people and . . . and the other stuff. Tell me a poem, Dan.”

“A poem?” Dan’s tiny voice spurts with excitement.

“Not a poem, but—” Louis rubs his fingers across his forehead. “But words. Tell me words, your words. I love it and I miss it and I can’t remember why. Tell me why. Is it my heaven?”

“Yeah, Lou, it’s your heaven,” Dan nods to him and his heart aches at the question, at the gentle demands. “The store or the counter or Ames or your brother. It can be the bricks—the bricks and the cement and the colour of the door—or it can be the records in the first aisle, the records in the second. It can be the coffee on your tongue, the cream around your lips. The sound of Ames’ playing or the drum of his foot, the strum of the strings. Their voices together or the words they said. What it felt like to kick your feet out on the counter or walk across the flooring. It’s your heaven if there was a heaven for you in it, Lou. Somewhere, at some time. Just a little like that.”

“A little like that?” Louis is smiling again, and he runs his hand down Dan’s back. “You’re good, Dan. So good at that.”

“I’m good at what, Lou?”

“Words and feelings and people and heaven,” he says. “You’re so sad and so crazy and you’re an artist, lovely boy, you’re an artist. You know my favourite memories better than I do.”

“I want to be a writer, Louis,” Dan stares at the sunflower and brings his nose to the delicate petals, breathing them in. They smell like happiness and smell like contentment. They smell like heaven. “I want to be a writer and I want to be an artist, just like Van Gogh and just like Phil Lester, just like my Phil. I want to write people’s memories and know the taste of nostalgia better than anybody else and I want to be sad so I can be pretty and I don’t care, Lou, I don’t care that I’m sad. I’d get that memory for you, I’d go and get it right now if I knew I wouldn’t hurt it. I’d lay out all the Saturdays in a little line and you could read all of them like your favourite books.”

“My favourite books, yeah,” Louis pushes his hand gently on Dan’s back and the pair start off again. “I have a lot of those, like songs and paintings. I want to show you that little place, and I’ll tell you about my heaven. My mom and my brother and my orange.”

“Your orange?”

“Hhm, orange,” he hums. “My favourite colour. Orange and thirteen.”

“Thirteen?”

“My lucky number.”

Dan smiles. “Lucky. I use _V_ s instead of _U_ s, Louis.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You can see it in me if you look hard enough.”

“See what, buddy?”

“My secrets and my feelings. My home.”

“Your talents, too,” Louis says.

And Dan says, “No. I don’t have talents, Lou.”

“Yes, you do,” The man frowns. “You can write, you can write good.”

“Because I write a lot,” Dan tells him. The sunflower is beautiful and Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “It’s not a talent, Lou. Talent doesn’t exist. Writing and painting and being an artist isn’t natural, isn’t gifted. God didn’t—he didn’t gift me this. Nobody did. I made it for myself, I did it for myself. I hurt and I write about it. I’m not talented, I’m an artist. You said that. And artists aren’t talented.”

And Louis doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that either. His silence comes softly stunned, comes steady but sudden. He keeps his hand on Dan’s back and a smile stitched onto his mouth and they wander through Paris, wander down the streets. Soon, the road starts to slant upwards—steeper and steeper—and there’s a grassy bank like a little park at the very top. It overlooks the city, borders the road. Dan thinks of the fire and thinks of the ocean and thinks of laying on the tarmac, but Louis kneads his fingers into his spine and guides him to a bench in the centre of the grass. Trees and shrubs and green, green green. Theo.

“This is pretty, Louis,” Dan comments, and the wood of the bench is warm under his thighs when he sits down. Louis is there next to him and he swings his bag from his back to rest it on his lap. “Is it your little place?”

“It is, buddy, yeah,” Louis smiles. “I used to draw all my sketches here when I was a student. You can see a lot of Paris if you stand up.”

And Dan wants to, but he doesn’t. Because the vertigo will grow busier in his stomach and his head and he clenches his little fists around the stalk of the sunflower to defend himself against thoughts of the food still sloshing in his throat. From where he sits, the city is moving in his eyes. Red and blue and purple in the inky-brown.

“I still need to draw you those aliens, huh?” Louis speaks again. He’s got his hands in his bag and he retrieves a pad with some pencils.

“Yeah, Louis, yeah. Your aliens, yeah.”

“I will, buddy,” he nods. “I talk and I draw and you listen and you think, okay?”

“I think.”

“You think. You think good, Dan. You can write if you want to, but I don’t have any pens and I know you like the way the words look on your skin.”

“It’s okay, Louis,” Dan says. “Tell me about your heaven and tell me about your mother. I can still write. I can write you into my heaven, my Paris. My brain.”

“Okay then, buddy,” Louis balances the pad on his legs and touches the end of his pencil to the white sheets. “My mother was called Destine, this woman you’d recognise even if you’d never seen her before in your life. She had the kind-of face that a blind person would look at, should they be granted five seconds of sight. Her hair was dark and never not curly, always falling an inch past her shoulder. Any more, she’d get an immediate cut. She couldn’t deal with that, it wasn’t right. She had these blue eyes that looked green from a distance but if you got close enough, they were grey. If you referred to her as having grey eyes, she loved you a lot. That’s what I always said and what always made her smile and I don’t know if there was much truth in it, but she liked it. Made her feel special.”

Louis’ hand is moving slow on the paper, the pencil steady. Dan glances at him and then back to his sunflower and it’s okay, it’s alright, because they both know he’s listening.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“She grew up with her mother, in a single parent family. It was just the two of them, but they managed. Her mother—my grandmother—was excellent. So excellent and so lovely and so strong. My grandfather was a soldier, you see, a French soldier. He passed suddenly, unexpectedly, when my mom was real young,” Louis pauses for a moment, and the silence crumbles with each passing car behind their heads. “My grandmother could’ve given up, been defeated by the weight of grief. But she didn’t, of course. She had a daughter to raise. I think often she carried on for the simple reason that he would’ve wanted to see what they’d both grow into, and there was nothing there to tell her he wasn’t watching. So she raised my mother, on hope and faith and minimum wage. And nothing was ever perfect, but it was alright. Alright, you know? Until my mother became a teenager, and started doing shit she shouldn’t. It’s a tale with a bit of a cliché beginning, I’m afraid, buddy. Nothing like your tales.”

Dan smiles down at his sunflower and thinks of Louis’ mother. His veins itch beneath his skin to scrawl metaphors about her, but his teeth are gritted tight. It isn’t the time, he knows. He’s so fucking crazy and his words are his therapy, but he knows. Not right now.

“Anyway, so she started doing all this bad stuff. Rebellion, a bit. She was thirteen and smoking cigarettes, fourteen and smoking weed. She was fifteen and kicked out of school and then she was sixteen and she was gorgeous and she was sleeping around and my grandmother was home worrying herself sick and my grandfather was still dead. She blamed that a bit, I think. Used it, played around with it. She ended up in a relationship with this guy, like, eight years older then her. My dad. And then suddenly she was pregnant with his fucking kid, and that kid was my brother. They up and ran and lived in hotels across France, smoking and drinking and ignoring the fact she was carrying a child. They got married and all that shit and when she finally gave birth to him, they moved in with one my dad’s friends. He worked away, so he was never there. And he didn’t charge rent, didn’t care as long as they didn’t destroy the place. My father was always a violent man, but he was so much fucking worse when he had to start providing shit. He wasn’t good with the law and the law wasn’t good with him and, low and behold, he ended up dealing.

My mother knew, she knew all along. She was addicted to half of the shit, most I can’t even remember. She tried to raise my brother the best she could but my father’s temper was only getting worse and he was constantly angry, constantly anxious. He’d spend days away from home, up in other parts of the country. Drinking, sleeping with other women. They were older than my mother, they could give him what he wanted. She was rushed off her feet all the time taking care of my brother and everything was just—everything was such a mess. She was a sane woman in an insane situation, Dan. She’d done bad stuff, and she was paying the price for it. And she was so fucking clever, you know? She was so clever. She could’ve been anything she wanted, done anything she wanted. But for that, I don’t blame my father. I don’t blame either of them, I don’t think. There’s a lot of stuff they both did wrong and a lot of it was just made worse by the fact they were together, the fact they had a kid.”

The strokes of Louis’ pencil are soft beneath his voice but they’re growing rougher around the words, and Dan peeks occasionally over at them because he’s mad enough to know the hands speak for the mind.

“My father was never there and although my mother needed him to provide for them, it was better that he wasn’t. He was a dangerous man, buddy. He was cruel and manipulative. She was still so young and so vulnerable and always so exhausted and she’d been forced into maturity. The real maturity, like, the one that matters. The one with the child, rather than the one with the drugs,” Louis breathes into the humid air and it’s weak, it’s difficult. “There was this period of time when my brother was two that things got real fucking bad. My father came back for a bit, got drunk and high off his face at home every night. They’d get into frequent arguments, which he’d always start. He was the frightening kind-of mad when he was drunk, when he was delusional. It wasn’t irritating, it was . . . it was terrifying. My mother started living in fear and constant paranoia, and he got her hooked on these prescription pills. He used to force her to take them, he used to hurt her and beat her and it wasn’t a fucking fairytale anymore, you know? It wasn’t a pair of dumb lovers on the run, it was _hell._ He was so much older, so much stronger. She could never stop him, never force him off. And this one night, everything changed. He started down different routes of violence, different ways to get control. He’d—Well, he’d, you know. He’d do stuff to her she didn’t want him to. Kiss her and touch her and—and, fuck, buddy, I’m not gonna say it, like—like this is my _mom_ and he was disgusting, he was horrible.

She fell pregnant with me in the summer and I was born when it was cold, when she was crazy-frightened and she couldn’t juggle another mouth to feed and she was still taking pills, still being forced to pussyfoot around the piece of shit. She did all she could to take care of me, to treat me right. I don’t remember much of him myself, it’s blurry and hard to explain. When he was home, he was high and he was with her and she used to do what he said for the simple fact that he wouldn’t come near us if she did. I spend a lot of my time thinking, like, what would have been different if they’d never had kids. Knowing her in the way I did, I think she’d probably have killed herself then. A while before, actually. And, hell, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d done it anyway. When we were so young.”

Dan holds his sunflower tight and pushes himself into Louis’ side. He put his hand on the man’s knee and listens as he continues to draw. Over and over and over.

“She tried to run away with us a few times. Always in the middle of the night, always when she thought he wouldn’t be coming home. I’ll never forget the way she used to stand there beside my bed with her hands around the curtains, pulling them back to search for his car down the street. The light would trickle in, right across my superhero bedsheets and she’d sneak back to pull a bag out that she’d hidden behind the wardrobe. I want you to write me something about that sometime,” Louis turns to look at Dan’s knees for a moment, as if it’s all he can manage. “Write me something about her and the way she looked, the way everything did. My brother sat up in his own bed, the colours and the darkness and the silence only ever broken by the front door. Because she never fucking said anything when we tried to leave, to neither of us. She’d just get the bags and stand in the doorway and she’d kiss our foreheads and then we’d go.”

“I’ll write her something, Lou,” Dan whispers. His voice sounds strange and his head is so tired, but this man is his friend and this man is hurting. He shuffles closer and says, “Carry on now. You talk and I listen. I’m writing in my head.”

Louis nods but it seems mostly to himself, if Dan can understand that in his delusion. He puts his pencil back to the paper and continues around the shape of something he’d call an alien, something he’d call his own. The shade is darker, tone stronger. His hand his shaking. “We never made it out, but we tried. She tried and she deserved the world for that in itself. As we grew up, there’d be nights when she’d tell us the bedtime stories that her mother used to. I know so much about my grandmother only because she told me so much, only because I never stopped asking questions and she never stopped answering them. She missed her deeply and she never forgave herself for leaving. But we got on, like, we did it. The three of us. We suffered through the mental shit and she suffered through the physical, suffered through both. Things were so hard, but we pretended they weren’t when we could.

It wasn’t until I was seven that it happened. My father, like, he was so violent and so fucked up but he never touched my brother and he never touched me. He never laid a hand on us, not ever. And it was this one night in December about nine, and I’d just had a bath and got into pyjamas for bed and my father came in and started screaming at me. I’d left some shit in the kitchen, just toys and figurines. Kids stuff. He was mad and high and knew how to do nothing but overreact, so he just yelled and yelled and yelled. He grabbed my fucking shirt, in this place right here—” Louis touched his free hand below his ribs on the left side. “And I thought he was gonna kill me, Dan, I thought he was gonna beat me. And I’ll never fucking know if he wasn’t because my mom, she—she’d heard and come in and she was frightened and saw I was frightened and so she—she just hit him across the back of the head. With this vase thing, this ornament. It was so hard and when he fell, she did it again. And then again and then again. He’d just grabbed my shirt, he’d just pinched the skin a bit but she saw that he’d touched me and it was enough and she snapped.

I don’t remember what it looked like, I don’t remember what it sounded like. I just remember my brother in the hallway because he was stood there screaming. Just screaming, buddy. Over and over and over. He was yelling and crying and making all this noise and so she went over and she held him and she tried to make him shut up, even though she’d just killed our bastard father in front of our eyes. And I just there and I stared. I stared as she packed our shit and, goddamn, she couldn’t get me out of that room for all the freedom in the world. But when we went, we never came back. Straight into the freezing night in pyjamas and with a manic mother and I loved her, I adored her, but he’d driven her insane. She didn’t know she’d been there so long that leaving meant nothing, that her clothes were still riddled with his smell and her skin was still riddled with his touch and her kids were still riddled with his mistakes. He was there in her head, there when she shut her eyes and there when she took the pills he’d forced her to.”

“And what happened, Lou?” Dan’s voice is feeble and frightened, his hand still on the man’s leg. “Where did you go?”

“Paris,” Louis chokes, and the trauma is scattered with pathetic humour. “We went to Paris, Dan, we came to Paris. My mother killed my father and then ran with us to Paris. She changed her name and shit, died her hair. It was blonde and we lived in a hotel for a long time.”

“A hotel?” Dan echoes. The city is red and blue and purple in the distance. “Which hotel, Lou?”

“Yours,” Louis says. “The one you’re in right now. It’s my home a bit, my home but not. I remember I told you guys my father owned it, but obviously that’s not true. I just know the owner pretty well, he was exceptionally kind to us. I didn’t really want to tell two visibly unstable men such a fucked up story when I’d only just met them. But it’s true, it’s true. We stayed there in the hotel for _years_ , it must have been. I spent a lot of time with brother and in that record store, you remember that record store?”

“Yeah, Lou,” Dan is nodding his head. “I remember, I remember. What happened to your mother? Where is she? What happened to your brother?”

“My mother carried on taking her pills, trying her best,” Louis continues. Drawing and working and thinking, thinking, thinking. “She met this woman when I was twelve or something like that, got into a relationship with her. She was so fucking desperate for love, Dan, she was so damaged and so lonely. And this woman was wonderful, but my mother insisted she didn’t want to be in love. She didn’t want a relationship. She used to say, “I don’t love and love don’t me.” All the time, she’d say that. To the woman and to us, to her kids. She just wanted to feel things with her body rather than her head and she found someone who gave her that and this someone tried, but my mother wasn’t . . . it was just too much. Too difficult. When she finally left, it was sort-of the end anyway. My mother overdosed a couple weeks later. The girl with the dead father, the girl with the hair never an inch past her shoulder and the girl with the green eyes or maybe the grey, depending on how much she loved you.”

Out of pills, out of love.

“She loved you, Louis,” Dan tells him, and holds the sunflower under his friend’s nose. “Have it, Louis, I’m so sorry. She loved you, I’m so sorry.”

Louis takes the flower between his fingers and puts his pencil down, sitting there with it in his hands. “The hotel room we stayed in had such a brilliant view of the sunset, Dan. She used to have a bed by the window and she looked orange under the sky when she slept. I think that’s my heaven, I think that’s some part of it. I don’t know whether my heaven is Paris or my Paris is her because Paris wasn’t good to her, Paris wasn’t her happy place. And I don’t know whether I’m selfish enough to wish her back here. Like I don’t know whether I’m selfish enough to wish my brother back, too. Because he moved away, he moved to London. When I was at the airport, when I met you guys, I’d been visiting him. We were on the same flight but you don’t know, you don’t remember. That’s okay, buddy. I knew you weren’t okay and I knew Phil wasn’t either and all I’ve ever fucking known is dysfunctional families, broken marriages and mental illness. When my brother moved and I was by myself, I was in such a dark place. No orange, no hope. And I wanted to kill myself but I didn’t want to die, ya’know? I managed to find a way to start as an art student, despite my rocky education. It was good, Dan. Art is so good. It makes everything hurt less, and you get that more than anybody I’ve ever met in my life. I wanted to tell you for that reason, I wanted to tell you because you’re my friend and you like stories and you’re so sad.” 

“Yeah,” Dan is hugging Louis, arms around his waist and the man has his chin on the smaller’s head. “You’re so brave, Lou, you’re so kind and so brave. Sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy. Some people don’t admit to the fact that all they want is for somebody to say sorry to them.”

“You’re going to be okay with Phil,” Louis tells him, hand moving over the little dips in his spine. “You’re both going to be okay and I’m doing my best to find a way to tell him that, too. You’re both crazy but crazy good at being crazy. Like my mom, you remind me so much of my mom, lovely boy. You haven’t killed Phil yet and he isn’t violent to you, but the things you say and the things you do just make me think of her. Van Gogh was her favourite.”

“He was?” Dan’s heart bleeds for the woman and he longs to get it all down on paper, longs to see his husband and longs to try and repair his book.

“He was, buddy,” Louis manages a smile. “She loved the mind of the man as much as she did the hand and you’re the only other person I’ve ever met who feels the same. And I was an _art_ student, can you believe it?”

“You’re my friend, Louis,” Dan squeezes him and stares at the sunflower’s yellow petals in his hand. “You’re my friend and I’ve written for you. I’ve written for you and for your mom, up in my head. She’d love it more than my hand, too.”

“She would,” Louis tells him. A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times. “And she’d love the bones of you.”

Dan smiles through all the colour.

_I don’t love and love don’t me._

Some things are simple.

And everything will be alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my favourite chapter and the longest so far. I loathe authors that create characters easily disregarded and looked over. They’re like little projects, things to construct and I often feel I owe them each a story and some of their own time in the plot. Louis deserved this, to tell his story. It’s so very fucked up, but same. Also if you know where that bloodstain quote is from and understand the significance, you’re fuckin’ awesome.


	14. Oxygen

**number fourteen: oxygen**

_Dan_ and his friend sit around for a long time, waiting on something or other. The city is still red and the city is still blue and it isn’t the time for it to be purple but it can be purple if it wants, too. Like it can be white and grey and black, the colour of nothing but the colour of something and _I write better when I’m sad, you know it better than anyone._

Louis stops drawing after a little while and stuffs his pad back into his bag.

Dan says, “Your aliens, Lou. I want to see your aliens, why can’t I see them?”

And Louis says, “You can. Of course, you can. Just not yet, they’re not there yet. Soon.”

“Soon,” Dan echoes, and then the silence is all soft in the air. Sewn into the stretches of sadness and scenery, spilled ink across the city like Shakespeare moved his arm too quickly and his elbow slid through sorrow in a mockery of the word _skill_. His skin smudged with black, his spelling sticky and stinging. Dan wonders if they think they’re alike at all, he and William, like they think so with he and Van Gogh. Strokes and signatures, struggling structures, sudden strains and superficial souls and _speak to me through syntax, stare at me through syllables._

The city is beautiful and the city is something, just as much as it is nothing. In Dan’s Paris, Paris is as much Paris as it is Arles. Is Manchester before the fire, in the station with the irritable fingers around the tangled sleeves and London in the middle of autumn with orange around the edges, bleeding out as if a child tried to colour the season between the lines. Dan’s Paris is a child and a child is his Paris and he is as much a child as he is the other one, the other thing. He’s bloody and broken, bruised and purple in the places he should be pale but he’s pretty with little splashes of pink here and there and he’s pretty with children’s literature wired into the sockets at the sides of his head. Paris is space pyjamas, blue bedsheets curled in the corners of the mattress. Tiny feet in tiny shoes, little bumps over little knuckles. A small mind in a small skull and a small boy in a small school and a small noun with a small adjective.

“I want to go home, Louis,” Dan whispers, and he’s thinking of a series of things. Brickwork, stonework. Foggy windows and misty glass, the walls around the door frames and the carpets curled at the corners. He’s thinking of a building but then he’s thinking of a time, he’s thinking of his first ten years with his mother and his father and his brother toddling across the flooring. The tailored trousers at weddings and the kids under the chairs, the music and the moment and the forgotten and the noticed and the year on the calendar, the red marker over the days. The view from the kitchen window, the weeds between the slabs on the patio in the garden and the bikes lifted into the sheds, the fragments of nothing but equally something cluttered and pushed together into havoc. And Dan wants to go home and he’s thinking of a person, he’s thinking of his husband and he’s thinking of his mother and he’s thinking of his cousins, thinking of his aunts and uncles.

He’s thinking of Louis and thinking of Theo.

Then he’s thinking of someone he can’t remember, thinking of someone his wrist bones ache to write and his broken head cramps to remember.

An old friend, maybe, somebody from somewhere far away but is sitting right here in the white between the black words. A name and a face, a foggy facade. Some interests, some dislikes. The little strips and bits that make up a person, that characters are dependant on but never anything more. A past and a present and the likelihood of a future.

Dan is thinking too much and he wants to go home. 

“Home?” Louis whispers over the wind. It’s muggy but growing less so, red but growing blue and blue but growing yellow. Or orange or white or grey or black, for it hasn’t been black yet and Dan’s Paris needs some of that. “Where’s your home, lovely boy? London? The hotel room? The nothing in the Manchester, the dust in the corners of an old bookshelf? Phil and Phil’s clothes or Phil and Phil’s anger or your mother or your father or your brother who is littler or your favourite book or your favourite colour or—Come on, buddy, you’re a writer. You’re an artist. Tell me where your home is.”

“I don’t know where my home is, Louis, I don’t know,” Dan sits on the bench shaking his head. “I want to go home, I want to keep walking. I want to see Phil and I want to kiss his mouth and I want to climb onto the roof and I want to smoke cigarettes and I want—I want to see my grandfather and I want to get up, Lou, please get up.”

Dan’s suddenly standing on the grass and it’s warm beneath his feet, but he looks down and there’s trainers stopping just around his ankles and he feels sick, he feels funny. Dumb and silly. He hopes it’s greener where Theo is, like he hopes it’s autumn where Louis’ mother is. She’s orange and she’s okay, on the bed closest to the window and on the porch stringing skeletons up for Halloween and she’s a sunset, she’s a hurricane. She’s a clusterfuck of something or other, but she’s still in the middle where the storm fails to wage and the wind fails to hiss. 

“Where shall we go, buddy?” Louis slings his bag onto his back, his sunflower slipped into its side pocket. Dan wants to tell him its delicate and the petals are yellow, but Dan tells him nothing. “I think we should head back, to the hotel room in Paris and in heaven and in alright. Phil’s alone still, he needs us to be there.”

“Phil,” Dan says the man’s name, and his breath puffs quick around the slow roll of the syllable. “Phil, yeah, Phil. Phil’s my husband and Phil’s my friend, even though I don’t have friends.”

“You have friends, Dan,” Louis says, with his fingers back over the spaces around his spine. He’s guiding him and they’re crossing a road and it’s slanting back down, slanting the opposite way. Dan’s got a vein in his wrist and it’s pointing north west, drawn out from his thumb all blue and all messy. Prominent amongst the others, the same but so different. “I’m your friend and Theo’s your friend. Little Theo.”

“Are you friends with Theo, Louis?”

“No, buddy,” Louis shakes his head. There’s a bike against a store front and Dan stops to drag his fingers across the metal, touch the strength and touch the paint and he brushes the wheel with his thumb so black and so inky. The bike is there, the memory, and it bleeds through his finger and he longs to touch it against a page but he has no page and he has no friends and he has no words. Louis hooks his arm around his tiny body and says, “Come on, Dan, we have to go. To Phil, remember? Come on.”

“Phil says he doesn’t love me, Lou,” Dan is watching his trainers on the sidewalk, watching them with thin eyes and it’s as if somebody’s drawn the scene with a too steady hand. “Do you love me?”

“Do I love you?”

“Yeah, Lou,” Dan nods. “Do you love me, will you tell me you love me? Phil doesn’t do it because Phil doesn’t feel it. Phil’s in love with his wine when it’s red on his lips and warm in his throat and he’s in love with me in love, but not in love with us in love. He used to be, Lou, but not anymore. We don’t love anymore and things aren’t as they should be. It’s why we came to Paris, this is Paris.”

“It is, yeah,” Louis looks around the street and there’s little bits of everything in the developing night, like a story somebody’s trying to write and you can see the places they’ve stopped for a glass of vodka right in the middle. You can see the places Dan’s dropped his pen and bent down to retrieve it just as much as you can see the places he’s took it from his paper and put it to his arm, drawn some lines over the skin with some _fuck you_ ’s and _love you_ ’s and _help me get better_ ’s.

You can see the places he’s fallen in love, got sicker and got madder and got calmer and sadder. The places he’s paused to watch flashes of television, answer a friend’s question and apologise for a mistake and the places he’s tucked his pen back up his sleeve to wait for tomorrow, to wait for more pain. Too much of one thing and not enough of another, too much of Dan and not enough of Phil. Too much of Louis and not enough of his mother, not enough of Dan’s father and not enough of his brother. Cousins and friends and kids and bikes and coming back some other time to find a way to write _thank you, the lot of you, you may have saved my life._

“People come to Paris, don’t they, Louis?” Dan asks the man. Orange and orange and over and over. His mother had green eyes and his mother had grey. “You came to Paris and I did, too. I came with Phil. 

“Yeah, buddy, that’s right. Paris is everything you wish you were and everything you are,” Louis tells him. He keeps moving the zipper on his bag and Dan’s head is asking what his aliens look like, whether creatures or gorgons or mutations or words. Mutations of words. “You write us our Paris, you know you write it good.”

“I don’t write it good.”

“Yeah, you do,” Louis nods. “Your Paris is alright, just alright. We’re here, you and Phil and I.”

One and one and one is three.

And Dan thinks of the third night trying to get drunk, the third time and the third finger on the third can in the fridge door. Maybe just three, even though three is not the favourite. Even though Dan has three times the shit to love, three times the sides and three times the words in his brain and on his tongue and _you are the words on my wall and the drink in my blood and ring me on the bus when it’s cold and I’ve had enough._ And _let me help you, let me call_ , three kicks and three angles and three messy clichés, three men and three friends but—

“Theo, too,” Dan is frowning. “It’s Theo, too. And Theo’s mother and your mother and sometimes Ella, sometimes her voice.”

Phone calls, sick days, _I want to be okay and I want to go home._ Like little children in little jumpers, little sleeves over little palms and little blankets over little bodies. Cheeks and temperatures, red and red in sickness and in health.

“All of that, all of those, yeah,” Louis’ voice sleeps through agreement, dreams through unison. “And that’s your Paris, it’s all your Paris.”

“No, Lou. More, there’s more. Other little things and somebody else, somebody I have to write onto the page and—and places I have to go, children I have to see. Stories I have to understand, stories I have to write,” Dan dances over a crack in the sidewalk. “I have to write more stories, Lou, I have to.”

“You will do,” Louis tells him, and it feels like a promise. A promise so honest and a promise so true. “You didn’t make it, you never did, but you think and you think so crazy and so mad. Phil does, too. But he doesn’t think like you.”

“I want to write about Phil, Louis, but Phil doesn’t like me when I do.”

“Why not, lovely boy?”

“He says it’s not fair and it’s not right, says they’re his words and I take them and I do it to everyone,” Dan is still dancing down the street. He’s looking for the little girl, pretty and pink with her hand in her mother’s. She’s like Theo, like Theo’s mother. She’s like the small thing that doesn’t matter but matters so much and Dan’s head bleeds through frustration when he can’t explain her significance. Small and gone before his heart can rush to another beat, but paragraph after paragraph of the moment in which she existed. “Phil says I’m a cheat and I know I am, Lou, I don’t write like the rest.”

“You don’t want to write like the rest. You know that, too. Your head doesn’t work how it should and that’s the greatest part of you, buddy. You’d be so boring if you couldn’t take the boring out of boring, the sadness out of sadness and replace it with the pretty. You think about thinking rather than thinking to think and you think things that need to be thought about rather than thinking things that need to be said.”

And Dan looks at the man, smiles at the man. There’s sunlight in the slight edges of his lips, but the shine and not the set because the set is Louis and the set is Paris.

The set is the hotel, the doors and the stairs. The walls and the corners and the lampshades and the carpets. The televisions and the windows and the switches and the curtains and the place, the home, the building. The plaster, the paint, the panels and the people. It’s the thing in the some, the no and the every and the first and the fourth and the _makes sense_ and the _does not._

Dan and Louis walk across the floors and past the hotel rooms and Dan swears he sees Louis’ mother behind them all. He swears he sees her in the doorway with her hand on the frame and her eyes so grey, her fingers around the back of the woman’s neck and through the strands of hair streaked with a colour Dan doesn’t know, Dan doesn’t care for. They’re standing with their mouths together and there’s a smudge of blood in the place Louis’ mother touches the woman’s hip, a smudge of blood across the tiny Louis’ shoulder when he appears and she’s gentle in pushing him away. A family, some cracks. They’re a Paris sidewalk and they’re the lines of light between the blinds and they’re the chain across the door when it’s already been locked three times.

And Dan swears if he had a black marker, he’d write their names down the skeletons of the doors and he’d carve the letters into the bones as if gravestones are placed in the places we die. As if he’s a priest and funeral songs are poems written in the black spun through poisoned webs, spiders weaving liquorice and shaking fingers applying mascara and stains on tissues, stains on pillows, stains on skin. Shoe polish on an early morning, there to cling and linger down the pews. Dan thinks of the coffee his grandmother took, thinks _black with no sugar_ and waking with words down the centre of his wrist.

Phil’s sat outside the hotel room when they wander around a corner and Dan stops dragging his fingers over the shitty wallpaper. He’s got his knees up and a bottle against his thighs and Dan’s a writer and a shitty romantic so he says there’s a line of saliva coming from the corner of his mouth before he’s close enough to even see grey from green. His husband is sat there with bloodied knuckles and no ring on his finger and Dan knows he doesn’t wear the piece of shit anymore but it’s like getting shot and lifting your shirt up and forgetting there’s still a wound, still a scar. Red and white. Red and grey, because Phil’s all grey. Grey shirts and grey smiles and grey words fastened tight with intoxication like belts over car seats. Like bandages on wrists, fingers taped up with blood soaked material.

The hospital gowns are bigger around the thighs.

The galaxies are bigger on Dan’s shoulders.

“And it was funny, it was so funny,” Phil’s slurring, breath blowing into the bottle top. There’s a girl at his side and she’s staring at him with a smile and half-sunken eyes, staring at him from where she sits with her back to the fourth wall. “You’d have laughed, goddamn, you’d have laughed so much. Bloody hilarious, bloody brilliant.”

“Phil?” Louis speaks, hand stretched back on Dan’s pyjama sleeve. He’s still orange and still sad and still strong and still weak and Dan loves him, Dan cares for him, but Dan’s head is frustrated again. The girl is watching him with her lips around a bottle of wine, with her fingers clutched to its neck and her shoulder brushing Dan’s husband’s. And he’s frustrated because she’s staring. He’s frustrated because she’s smiling. He’s frustrated because she’s not frustrating but he wishes she was because frustration isn’t frustrating to explain.

“ _Louis_ , hey,” Phil exaggerates a lift of his bottle, exaggerates a greeting and every fucking syllable and Dan fucking hates him and Dan fucking loves him. Dan tries to fucking look at him, but it isn’t the same. He doesn’t know who this girl is and he doesn’t know her name. And he’s the kind-of writer who tries to describe a thousand fucking things before the one thing is stated and so he gets his pen and he begins _you look sort-of crooked sitting there, with your back against the wall._ Because she’s crooked, she’s angled. She’s so hard to depict, so strange for a stranger. And Dan feels her in the breath he exhales to answer, the breath he lets flicker like the flame on a lighter through the breeze of December when he decides to say nothing instead.

It’s so white and so cold when he decides to write her down.

She’s one thing and another thing and then another thing, too. She’s three but she isn’t because three just isn’t her and Dan thinks she’s more two, more _a couple_ than _a few_ and she’s got two hands around the bottle she’s holding to her lips. She’s got two years left to live or some shit, got to catch her train before the number and got two eyes to look at Dan through and two eyes to never cry through and she is the two omicrons in the definition of the episode. She’s an artist, quite possibly, though Dan isn’t sure that she’s sure. But she’s there against the wall with her heart so messily wrapped around his fingers and he swears she doesn’t know it, swears she’s so hesitant towards the _you, you, you_ he’s scribbled across everything for everyone to see. But he’d never write again if it meant her heart wouldn’t bleed, if it meant he walked around with his wrists tied and her organ in both of his hands. 

And this girl has said nothing and she’s got red stains on her thin lips when she brings the bottle back down from her mouth. Her hair’s dark, falling like it could be straight or could be curly and she’s in a shirt that’s got its corners tucked into the waist of her jeans. Black, band. Dan wants to write himself as the creases indented where it ends above her thigh, as the arch in her knee where her jeans fold together because she’s got her leg kicked up and she’s got the happiness they say went _that_ way with their fingers pointing north west like the vein in Dan’s wrist connected to his thumb. 

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

Louis says, “What’s happening? Why are you sitting out here? Who’s this?”

“I’m _drinking_ , Louis, you should try it sometime,” Phil slurs and moves his index finger in the air. Dan’s still watching the girl and she’s peeling the corner of the label on the wine and Phil says, “Oh, hey, Dan. Hey, baby, hey.”

Dan doesn’t like it in his voice, but he adores the way it sounds in the air. Like he adores the way this girl has said nothing but he could write two novels on her silence, could write two novels and not a page more because she likes three but doesn’t work with it, likes two and works best. 

“Hello,” Dan says to her. He’s got two fingers in the air and a job to fucking do, some words to fucking vomit and some pain to write away and a _yes_ , a _no_ and sometimes even a maybe. He’s got a sunflower in Louis’ bag and there’s red across this girl’s mouth and he’s in love with the unlikelihood of being in love with the colour. But she smiles at him, and he stumbles a bit forward. She smiles at him and looks at him and Louis is orange and Phil is grey and they’re his Paris, they’re his _alright_ , but they’re not what he can’t explain.

Because Dan’s heaven is words that work beautifully together, his heaven is melancholia and his heaven is a better chapter and his heaven is thinking just as much as it is not. And this girl says, “Hey, there,” and her voice is the soft touches of a mother brushing jam out of the corner of her child’s mouth.

She doesn’t know it, Dan thinks, probably doesn’t like it. But it is.

“Who are you?” Louis asks her, and Dan’s moved away from him. The sunflower is still in his bag. His mother is still in his eyes.

“Hélène,” she speaks, and nods over to Phil. “Is this one yours?”

“He’s my husband,” Dan rushes. Water out of the faucet, damp tissues mop up red better than dry. A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times.

“He is?” The girl asks, then smiles again. “That’s nice. So you’re Dan, right?”

“Yeah,” Dan grins and thinks if he were to put his fist to his mouth and cough, there’d be splatters of yellow smudged into the crevices of his fingers. Delicate and happy. “Yeah, I’m Dan, yeah. Dan. How did you know?”

“Phil told me, your Phil,” Hélène smiles again. “Your husband. I’ve heard a lot about you. The character is the author and shit, you know? I know you.”

“You know me, yeah,” Dan is nodding and he swears—even when he puts shitty lines through the poetic verses so he’s left with the weight of reality—he knows this girl. He knows her from somewhere, even if he doesn’t know where. She looks like his friend, she looks like an artist. She’s got a bag at her side and the bottle back at her lips.

She says, “And you’re Louis, I know you too.”

“Yeah,” Louis says. He’s orange and he’s the sunset and he’s not a moment before. He has his hands through the straps on his bag. “Why are you sitting out here?”

“I found him here,” she says, with a hand waving to Phil. Dan watches the way she retracts it and then brings it back to her lap. “He locked himself out, he has no key. But he has alcohol, a fuck ton. Cigarettes, too. I just sat with him, I have nowhere else to be. Or I do, but I don’t want to be there. I’m just waiting around, on something or other. Someone or other.”

“How long has he been sat here?” Louis asks her. “Only, he’s—he’s sort-of sick. Not well, you know?”

Hélène shrugs her shoulders. She’s still crooked against the wall and Dan sees her in Phil, sees her in the shit he doesn’t see in himself. Self-deprecation and red streaks of anger. He sees her in the good, the bad and the very bad but he sees her in _I’m happy, I’m so fucking happy_. “I’m not sure how long he’s been here. I’ve been sitting a while, I should probably get up.”

“Phil is an alcoholic, Hélène,” Dan tells her and she looks over at him with a sincerity she seems to find as her eyes move through the air. She’s red and often angry, Dan thinks, but then she’s the thread on his school jumper and the blood in his veins and the blood isn’t horrifying anymore than it is pretty. “Are you an alcoholic?” 

Hélène smiles and shakes her head at the man. “I try to be.”

And Dan’s throat burns when he laughs. It’s strange, it’s different, and it tickles under his ribs in the places his pain pulses. He’s sick and he’s giddy with the weight of the world and he likes the way she looks with the smile stitched across her mouth, with the words on her tongue she’s about to say and she never will and she’s the kind-of art that doesn’t know it’s art.

She’s Dan’s writing, Dan’s words.

A tragedy of the blandest sorts, a tragedy so red and a tragedy so black and Dan wants to cut his arms to see if he’d bleed her name but _no, no, that’s too much_ and _no, no, that’s too real_. Two slashes, two stretches of skin.

She’s the kind-of girl who has to sleep before two or she’ll miss her train and Dan wants to write himself as the one to wave her goodbye every night.

He says, “You’re funny, Hélène,” and he knows Hélène doesn’t know it.

And he’s frustrated and he’s frightened because he doesn’t know how to show it. He gathers his words and he orders them into a line and he writes _you’re so strange_ and he writes _I can’t write when you’re lingering in my mind._

Phil scoffs something and it’s Dan and it’s angry and he tries to get up off the floor, but he can’t. So he fists his shirt and the salvia runs further, runs right off his chin, and he looks like he did the time Dan found him at the bottom of their stairs when he walked through their front door. Cigarettes lined across the step, a lighter and some vodka and some _fuck it_ ’s to get through the night. Four hours, five hours, another hit and another kick and _come sit with me, Dan, come smoke with me._ He’d laughed about something that wasn’t funny and Dan had tried to lift him with hands under his arms but it hadn’t worked like it never fucking did, like they never fucking did, and Dan left him there to cut deep enough to scoop out his lungs and liver. Because maybe he didn’t care and maybe even if he did, he could stick pins in the organs and string them up onto his walls and write about how they weren’t hurting anymore and how Phil had put them out of their misery.

“I don’t love you no more, Dan,” Phil tells him, sobriety drained from his voice with each bottle drained of liquid. Syrup on his tongue, syrup in his throat. “I don’t love you and I-I want you to go and I never want you to—Fuck you, Dan. Fuck you.”

“I’m sorry, Phil,” Dan starts saying, over and over and red and over. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—You slept with somebody else, you touched her and you’re having a baby and my mother came to see me and Louis’ mother came to see us and—”

And Dan thinks about them under purple lighting, thinks of Ella’s name soaked in gin and _please, please_ and Phil’s pale fingers on her hips and his voice in her ear and _I’m fucking married, did you know?_

“Phil, please,” Louis is saying. He’s knelt down in front of him and Dan’s slumped on the carpet and he can see the sunflower getting crushed against the side of the man’s bag. And it’s a little like Van Gogh pouring another colour into his stomach, choking on blue and choking on grey and regurgitating nothing, regurgitating fragments. Smears of black across white paper and smears of white across black plaster and _I wrote your words on my wall, they look pretty and they look good._

“I fucking saw what you did,” Phil chokes, drunk and violent and there’s two fists against one countertop, two fingers down one throat and two words on one sheet like _you_ and then _I_ and then _I know things work well in threes, but I’ll write in couplets and give everything a pair if you tell me that’s what you want me to do_. “I saw w-what you did to my book, y-you fucker—”

“I sold the copies, Phil,” Dan is crying and Dan is weak. Dan is pathetic and Dan is broken and Dan has broken his husband. “I sold them, it was me. I-I’m sorry, Phil—I love you, I’m sorry—”

“Y-You fucking _don’t_!” Phil yells, and there’s a jolt and a smash and Dan can’t see it but he hears the bottle go. Louis and Hélène and Ella and Theo. Little bumps and tiny fingers. There’s alcohol spilling across the carpet and Dan thinks about the blood all over the bathroom tiles, thinks about holding his head up in the shower because the floor was so red and red was so terrifying. 

But now Hélène has her hands around the sides of Dan’s back and she’s moving them up over his shoulders, over his shoulders. The galaxies are bigger there and she isn’t the kind-of person that needs to be told it.

She isn’t the kind-of person that needs to be told much but she’s damned if she isn’t learning and she’s damned if she doesn’t know it. She’s damned and she’s damaged, Dan can feel it in her touch, but there’s art in her blood and strength in the way she doesn’t try to make nothing anything much.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she says, right into Dan’s ear. He’s cold and he’s crying and he’s eight years old and sitting in the tub and his back is too close to the hot tap and he leans and burns his skin and it feels so shit, he feels so shit. He wants to fucking die and the sunflower is ruined and Van Gogh never ate yellow paint and he never thought it would make him happy. Because _God, Dan, stop trying to make it so pretty_ and _God, Dan, the man was depressed._

“Hélène,” he cries, if that’s even the girl’s name. She’s art and she’s blurry and he’s going to get his eyes tested because _why the fuck can’t I write about how beautiful you are?_ “H-He hates me, y-you hate me—”

“No, no, Dan,” Hélène says. “I don’t know you, you mad man, I can’t hate something I don’t know.”

And Dan wishes he could tell her he’s in love with the people who regard shit before they ever consider disregarding it and he wishes he could tell her that twos don’t come around often. That threes are quite frequent, threes are quite common. Things often come in threes and it’s pretty and it’s complex but Dan wishes it could be simple, wishes it could be a little less.

And two is so simple and two is so silly, two is one away from three and one away from one and—

Louis tells Hélène to do something and she clings her fingers to the sides of Dan’s shirt like she’s a statue and she’s stone and he’s the ground they built her on, the ground they thought she’d look nice on. She leans across to take something from the sunset and not a moment before and Dan is sobbing and Phil is yelling when she says, “I have the key for your room, Dan, Louis says I should take you to sit inside. Did you hear him, dear? Did you hear him? I’ll help you through, I don’t think I have anywhere to be. Come on.”

And Dan doesn’t have the words to explain the situation. The hotel is sleeping and his husband is screaming and Louis’ mother used to lay in the orange beneath the window. She has grey eyes but she has green because Dan never knew her and she never knew Dan. And even if she did, she’d hate him. Like she’d hate his ugly fucking words, scratched and streaked across the page and Dan starts thrashing at Hélène when they’re walking through the door because she’ll hate him too, she’ll hate him in time. Everyone hates him and everyone loathes him and nobody would cry if he died. His mother or Phil or Louis or Theo.

And now Hélène too, even though she knows nothing but that she knows Dan from somewhere.

Phil is kicking his feet at Louis’ shins and there’s blood all over Dan’s tiny hands, blood smudged around the white frames when he lifts them to the door and tries to move away.

“No, Dan, it’s this way,” Hélène says, and she’s slung her bag onto her back. One strap, maybe, but it should be two. Two, two, two. “It’s this way, come and see. The character is the author, I want to talk to you here. I want to talk to you in Paris.”

“Nobody l-likes me, Hélène,” Dan sobs. A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times. “I try s-so hard and nobody likes me, nobody cares, nobody—”

“I heard you like stories?” she asks him, hand hard on his little back. She’s got the wine in her other grip with a packet of cigarettes and she’s frustrating, she’s so frustrating. Dan cuts cords of liquorice to wrap tight around his windpipe and write _help me fucking feel_ and he wishes he could hurt himself, he wishes he could vomit. His fingers touch the inside of his bottom lip again and they run over his gums and he has a vein that points north west, a friend that likes the ocean but doesn’t like birthdays and a friend that likes orange and a friend that misses his mother. Hélène says, “I have stories to tell, Dan, I can tell you my stories. Would you like a story?”

His parents’ bed and _Don Quixote._ Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and the flowers in the guest room, the yellow house in Arles. Noah’s Ark and a lonely Adam on the eve of a divorce.

And Dan doesn’t know how the fuck it happens, but he’s sitting on a mattress. It’s concrete under his thighs and he thinks of the days he got high on the cold fucking curbs, his trainers on the tarmac and his boyfriend in the bar and his father on his phone, his father and his _don’t touch him, don’t you ever touch him again._

“Do you smoke, dear?” Hélène asks. She’s lighting a cigarette near the windowsill.

“I-I smoke, I want to smoke,” Dan cries. “They say I shouldn’t, but I want to. Please, Hélène, p-please can I smoke? You have such a pretty name, you have such a pretty face. I want to smoke cigs with you and I w-want you to make me laugh.”

“You can smoke, Dan, I’ll let ’ya have a smoke,” Hélène tells him, and balances her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She’s dropped her bag down and she’s facing the window. “I smoke, but I can control it. Not really a habit, not really an addiction. My mom cracked my cigarettes in her hands when she found them. My brain likes it, and we agree on it. Are you addicted?”

“A-Addicted,” Dan echoes. “Addicted, Hélène, I’m addicted. Addicted to cigs and addicted to P-Phil and addicted to poems and addicted to hope.”

“Poems? You like poems? Can I read some of your poems?” she turns to ask. “You can have a cigarette if I can have a poem. This thing, you and I, it has to work both ways. Things work well in twos.”

“Two,” Dan is crying when he starts nodding again. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “Two, you like t-two. Is it your lucky number, Hélène?”

“It is, dear,” she says. She’s beautiful against the black of the city. “It smiles at me. I used to say so when I was a kid.”

“I-It smiles at you,” Dan echoes her and the sudden yellow blanches out through the red of Phil’s cries, the red of Phil’s screams. Louis’ mother killed herself and Dan never saw her grey eyes, never even saw her fucking green.

“It does, it does. This is a nice sill,” Hélène comments. “I like to climb and dangle my feet. Do you want to try it? You can tell me a poem up there and we can smoke up there, okay?”

“Okay, Hélène, o-okay,” Dan says and climbs from the bed, climbs from the mattress. Children skipping over the cracks in concrete and concussions too cuckoo for them to ever recreate. “I-I’m scared of the dark, you know? I’m so scared of the dark, I’m so scared of the night—”

“The dark? You’re frightened of the dark?”

“The d-dark and the night and I have nightmares and I have b-bad things, u-up in my head,” Dan is stumbling across the room and stumbling across his sentence and she hooks her fingers around his thin wrists as if she’s trying to stable him, as if the everything is in the tips of her thumbs and their probable-fleeting universe is in the lines of her skin. Because she’s entangled in his words and he’s entangled in her simplicity, in her creation and her comedy and her little-to-no sanity.

“That’s okay, dear, it’s okay to be frightened. We can find stars, we can find Orion,” Hélène says and lifts herself up onto the windowsill. Dan thinks about Phil but it’s too much and not enough and so he starts dragging his fingers down his motherfucking arm. And Hélène is there to pry them away, to shake her head and whisper, “No, no, Dan. Don’t harm yourself, come up here. It’s lighter up here, it’s nicer up here. Do you need me to—”

“I c-can do it, Hélène,” Dan tells her and pushes his arms up, heaving his frail body onto the surface beside the glass and crawling to touch his fingertips against it. He whimpers, “It’s dark, I-I don’t like it. I want to open the window, Hélène, can we open the window?”

And Hélène says, “I think so,” then messes with the lock. She unhinges it and pushes it back and she’s a sane woman in an insane situation and Dan likes the way she likes to climb and likes the way she pushes her feet out. He likes the way she says, “Now you, dear, I won’t let you fall,” and hands him his cigarette and shuffles into his shoulder and watches him drop his feet out of the window.

Dan realises he could jump and he realises it would hurt but then he realises he wouldn’t be able to write about it. And how motherfucking awful it is to be anything but an artistic suicide, anything but some words arranged into a pretty order over a series of colourful pills. Yellow for Van Gogh and pink for the little girl and blue for the baby’s cardigan and grey for Phil’s shirt and orange for the light on Louis’ mother and green for tiny Theo.

“I-I like children, Hélène, children are so lovely,” he tells her. He knows nothing about her but he knows he knows so much. And he knows she knows they know one another, on a set not titled _Paris_. Where their brains are different but terribly similar and it is a terrible tragedy that they’ve been written together, a terrible tragedy that they’re trying so hard. But one and one is two and Dan has two feet hanging out of the window and there are two brains sitting on the sill and Dan doesn’t want to kill himself anymore than he wants this girl to talk.

“I think I like children, too. Sometimes. I like to treat them as my friends and not everybody wants to be my friend.”

“There are children in my heaven, Hélène, children in m-my Paris,” Dan pauses to wrap his lips around his cigarette and the smoke so white, the smoke is so suffocating. But Hélène is so red and Hélène is so black and Dan thinks she’s so wonderful, in a world so wonderless.

“That’s nice, dear. Sometimes, you know,” she says. “I tell them my stories. But they don’t often listen. Or they do, and they don’t like it.”

“Are you a w-writer too, Hélène? Do you write stories, too?”

“I’m a storyteller, I’m a bit different. A film student, not a writer. But I tell stories and so I travel and somewhere I have my Paris, somewhere I have my camera and my friends and some wine and some cartoons, some good ones, you know the real fucking good ones? They’re better when you’re drunk,” she laughs a little and Dan watches her smoke. He has _K_ s on his wrists and he thinks they’re _X_ s. “Everything is so much better when you’re drunk.”

“Film,” Dan says. He doesn’t know if he’s crying and he doesn’t know if he’s dangling and he doesn’t know if Phil’s still screaming behind the door. “You study film, Hélène, why do you study film?”

“I like film,” Hélène tells him. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve liked it. I’ll never be famous, like, I’ll never be a _director_ or anything but I have enough, this is enough.”

“Yeah,” Dan is smoking and nodding. “This is enough. I like to write and that’s enough, too. Did you know? I like to write.”

“I know, I heard,” she smiles. “How so, dear? What do you write?”

“I write words and I write poems.”

“And what are these poems about?”

“Just silly things, Hélène,” Dan tells her. “I think a lot and I want to say a lot but nobody listens and my brain doesn’t like my tongue. Things are so sad and I’m not very happy, Hélène.”

“No?” she breathes. “Me neither, darling. But I can be enough and this can be enough. I live in an apartment, in some city. Somewhere. It’s white and it’s got big windows. There are windows like this to dangle my legs out of and there are balconies to ukulele, to play my ukulele. There are easels and posters and words on walls and there’s a little blue bathroom with little blue bath bombs and in the middle of my floor, I have a mattress.”

“A mattress?”

“A mattress, yeah. When everything breaks, crumbles a bit, I curl up on it with warm milk and fairly lights and I don’t cry because I can’t cry but it’s nice there and it’s safe. And I play my bass, you know? In my underwear there at four in the morning.”

Dan moves the cigarette from his mouth and giggles in the cool breeze. Paris is red and Paris is blue and Paris is purple. “You’re silly,” he says. “You’re so silly.”

“No, no,” she shakes her head, and leans across with a smile. “I’m a _badass_ , Dan. A badass. Do you know what ones of those are? It’s one of me.”

“You’re cool, Hélène, I like you’re cool,” Dan says. “Silly and cool. I write poems about thinking and poems about the ocean.”

“The ocean?”

“Yeah, Hélène. The ocean.”

“I love the ocean,” she says. Dan’s skin is prickling and he doesn’t know where Phil is. “The ocean is so beautiful. I wish I could take a boat out some time, in the middle of a storm, with bottles of wine and cigarettes and loud music and I wonder if the lightning would hit me, if I told it I admired it.”

“Do you like storms, Hélène? Storms are pretty, too.”

“I _love_ storms,” she breathes, with little clusterfucks of excitement in her hurricane eyes. “I go to the window and wrap the curtains around my back with my warm milk again, the warm milk. I like your pyjamas, dear, your pyjamas are lovely.”

“You think so?” Dan beams at her.

“Yeah, yeah. I think so. Of course, I think so.”

“What colour are your aliens, Hélène? What colour are you?”

Hélène smiles. “What colour do you think I am?”

“Black and red,” Dan says, too quick and too dramatic and too many twos, too many times. “You’re black because you like to wear black and you’re black because it’s nice. I don’t talk about black, Hélène, people don’t listen. But you listen. You’ll listen to me. You’re black and you’re beautiful and you’re red and you’re angry. And angry is just angry, angry is just red. People have red aliens and I never understood it, but red aliens are okay. My heaven isn’t red but there’s red in it. What’s your heaven, Hélène?”

Hélène breathes a sigh and rests her head against the wall. She kicks her feet out of the window and stares at the city. “I don’t often believe in heaven. It just doesn’t seem right, you know? _Heaven_. Religion is vile, so repulsive and so nasty. If there was a heaven, dear, you’d be okay. You wouldn’t suffer. People like you don’t deserve to suffer.”

“And you, Hélène. You’re red and I’m blue and Paris is so purple.”

“Not me,” Hélène shakes her head. A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times. “I’m quite fucking replaceable, Dan. I’ll have to go soon, leave soon.”

“No, Hélène,” Dan jolts in his place on the window and reaches for the frame above his head to secure his position. So stable and unstable. “You’re not replaceable. I don’t know you, but I think I do. Somewhere, I think I do. Somewhere, I think we’re friends and somewhere I think it matters that you matter and I matter and nobody else does. You’re not a lot to them but you’re the oxygen to me and they don’t get it, they don’t have to. And I breathe in so much, I breathe out so much. But it’s always oxygen that I breathe, Hélène, somewhere it’s always you.”

And Dan doesn’t seem to mind that she doesn’t believe in heaven. He doesn’t seem to mind because she doesn’t seem to mind and her name is Hélène and she plays the ukulele and she’s the kind-of girl who thinks she’s replaceable, but the kind-of girl who frustrates the writer because the writer does not know how to write her. Too much, not enough. She’s the moments between the claps of thunder like he’s the moments between the messy heartbeats and she has to sleep before two, she says she’s so pretentious. She makes little sense to the people with no sense because the people with no sense don’t listen to her little sense and the people with no sense question her sincerity, question her every move. She’s black and she’s red, she’s the girl moving Dan from chaos into calm and then working chaos into that calm and she’s _what am I like when I’m drunk?_ as he’s _fuck, please get out of my head._

She wears other people’s skin and she acts and she performs and she’s theatre breaks, frozen lakes, excited fingers and dangerous thoughts. She’s the facade so replaceable but the mind so and Dan doesn’t know how to fucking tell her that he doesn’t love her doors, he loves her broken hinges.

So he just says, “I like you, Hélène.”

Because she seems so often red, but so often blue.

And she says, “I like you too, dear. I want to talk some more.”

And Dan tells her that he wants to talk more, too. He tells her that he wants to talk until she has to catch her train, and she tells him that she’ll come back and she promises over an ocean. Because it’s an ocean and it’s tears, it’s cars and it’s tales of fantastic foxes’ tails and fleeting fucking parents and _I get you, you get me, I adore you and you adore me._

And it’s their way of saying _friends._

It’s their way of saying _stay._

It’s their way of saying of _somewhere, tell me this is okay._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was fun to write. “Hélène” is based on a friend of mine, somebody it seems so obvious I have a lot to say about lol. If there are things here that are confusing, this is just Teeth and this is just me and this is just my head and this is just my words and Dan is more me than he will ever be Dan. These words are more me than they will ever be him and it’s ironic and it’s personal and it’s a diary, of sorts. If you don’t understand things, that’s okay. Know I probably I don’t either x


	15. Vacate

**number fifteen: vacate**

_Dan_ and Hélène sit together on the windowsill for a while, their feet dangling down the facade of the hotel. There’s brickwork behind Dan’s heels and he kicks his ankles against the surface, kicks them with a force and then no force at all. The wind is loud and cool through the city and Dan’s a writer, Dan’s an artist, so he scrawls brief verses on the scene. Paris at night, the breeze and the lights and the black sky with the pale edges as if somebody’s used sandpaper on the corners.

It’s not creative, he thinks. But there are metaphors and there are sequences and it’s enough.

Hélène is smoking another cigarette when she says, “I smell like cold tobacco.”

Dan smiles at her. Phil’s screams are softer in his ears, muffled by the wood of the door and the width of the fourth wall and he wishes he had something to drink, he wishes he had something to inhale. White flakes lined on whiter surfaces, white tongues and white eyes with red lines through the colour. Dilated and bloodshot. Empty and distant, but never fucking closer. And Dan’s got smoke tickling in his lungs when he closes his eyes and thinks about laying with his teenage lover on an old carpet, the colour fading and the air compressing and _look at me, look at me, so fucking high._

Phil used to discard words when he’d taken too much. When he was on vodka or molly, when he couldn’t stand and he couldn’t see and he’d take hits and take kicks and lose the ability to fucking communicate.

“It’s pretty up here, Hélène,” Dan tells her. He doesn’t want to think about Phil anymore. He doesn’t want to think about them anymore. He doesn’t want to think about the drugs and the sex and the blood anymore. “I like to dangle my feet, too. I like to look at the city, too.”

“It’s nice, yeah?” she says. “Windows and balconies and cities. I’ll light you another cigarette, if you tell me a poem of yours. Your Phil said you write them, he said you write them good.”

“I write them, I write them,” Dan nods. He has a hand clutched to the ledge below his thighs, securing him on the sill, and he’s thinking about words and he’s thinking about Phil and he’s thinking about _pretty_ and _published_ and _proud_. He’s a man too shitty to be a writer and too crazy to be shitty and they didn’t want his words because his words didn’t want them.

His words will never want them.

Like his words will never want anything, for his words are everything.

“Can you read me one? Do you write them down?” Hélène asks. She’s beautiful, Dan thinks. He wants to write her down and he wants to use red ink. Red ink through the tales of her favourite constellation, through her anger and her guilt and her frequent intoxication. Through her adoration of stories, the ocean and movies and audiences who listen, people who think. She is pocketknives and _don’t tell lies_ and _I over-analyse, don’t ask me to explain shit._

Dan says, “My stories are shitty, Hélène. You’d think they were shitty. I write poems and stories and nobody likes them, nobody ever likes them. They’re always too much, Hélène, always too much of what they shouldn’t be.”

“No, no,” Hélène is looking at him. She’s half-turned to him and her everything is in the touch of his thumbs. “I love stories. Have I told you? I love stories.”

“You don’t _know_ my stories—”

“I think I do,” she mutters. Her eyes are gentle and she’s red, so red, and Dan doesn’t like red but Dan likes her. It’s confusing, he thinks, frightening and confusing. She’s chaos and she’s amusement, spools of stress and suffering and silence and _souls are superficial_ and _I’m in the black spinning silk like in all those stupid movies_. “I think I know you somewhere, and I think I know your words. I think I use them a lot and I think they’re wonderful.”

“Wonderful,” Dan echoes, soft around his cigarette.

“Hhm,” Hélène hums. “Amazingly mad and madly amazing. Your mind is beautiful because it isn’t. Do they tell you different?”

“They,” Dan whispers. His little fingers start shaking around his drug and he puts it to his lips to breathe in so hard because maybe it’ll fucking choke him. “They’re not nice to me. My head isn’t nice to me. It doesn’t like me.”

“I know, dear,” she says, and then she’s lighting another cigarette. “Here, you have this. Smoke two, breathe deep. Two is better than one and two is better than three. Where does your Phil keep his alcohol?”

“I don’t know, Hélène,” Dan says. He’s smoking two. Two, two, two. And he’s looking around the hotel room, looking at the walls and looking at the ceiling and looking at the sheets all rumpled on the bed. “I don’t know where he gets it, I don’t know where he keeps it. My Phil is so sad. My Phil drinks because he’s so sad.”

And Dan cannot think of anything but his twentieth year, their second and their greatest and their maddest and their wildest and _fuck you, love you, I am so fucking drunk._ The twentieth year, in which Phil would take shots and Phil would drink wine and he’d collect beer in caskets like Dan collected stamps in his fourth year of education. Little toy cars and dinosaurs with broken tails and race tracks, football plaques, _I had that before you had that_ and _friends, friends, friends._ Dan thinks about the kids in his science class, with the chemicals on their skin and under it too, not because they were careless with the equipment but because they were careless with their hearts. And they were in love when they were nine, in love when they were ten, letting naivety spill out of their ribcages like fucking peroxide. Gas taps and bunsen burners, flames lit too closely to textbooks with safety precautions inked under the name of a childhood sweetheart.

Red ticks. Red crosses. Boxes for answers, confined spaces and cramped heads and _study, study, study._ The kids were wide-eyed, the kids were so callow. Gangly limbs and grimy faces, weekday mornings and curtains against rails and _get up, get up_ , Dan’s father and Dan’s mother, the rearview mirror, the school gates and their colour and _love ’ya, love ’ya, I’ll promise I’ll see ’ya—_

Late to first lesson, second and third and dew over gazes and fog over fields and dirty fucking trainers, folded fucking timetables. Dan staggered into adolescence with a personality of poison and pills, a past punctured with purity and _please stop alliterating _P_ s, please stop pretending your parents were so pitiful and your past was so poignant, you pathetic fucking prat._

And Dan’s twentieth year was his greatest but he misses his tenth, he misses his home. He misses the chemicals and the kids and the friends. He misses the grass, the mud and the knees and the immaturity, the innocence, the compassion with no catch.

Dan is thinking about twirling his mother’s hair around his finger when he hears Hélène say, “Hey, darling, are you alright?”

Dan starts shaking his head and rocking his knee and he’s using both hands for both cigarettes and he doesn’t fucking _care_ if he motherfucking falls. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy and Van Gogh was an artist, a tragedy of the blandest sorts. 

“Why are you shaking, dear?” Hélène puts her hand around Dan’s shoulder. “What are you thinking about? Can you tell me? Can you write it?”

Dan just trembles and shakes his head. Dan just smokes, just breathes in, just looks at the horizon and tries to find where the sky begins. Because wherever the sky begins, the ocean begins. And wherever the ocean begins, everything begins, like the first lines of the first novels and the first strokes of the first paintings. As if the first moment of the first day in the seven days of creation began with seven rolls of the first tide, up over the first seven grains of sand amongst the first seven pebbles.

“Would it hurt if I fell, Hélène?”

“If you fell from up here?”

“Yeah, Hélène. From up here. From heaven.”

“It would, dear,” she tells him, and then kicks her feet against the bricks. “It would hurt, but concrete is nice. I like concrete. I went on a trip, you know? A trip around Europe, a trip with my friends. We went places, we went somewhere. I got smashed in cities and visited places and the mattresses in the hostels, they were concrete. Looked like it.”

“Concrete,” Dan echoes. Grey like Phil’s shirt, the thread pulled and worn. “Concrete, Hélène, really?”

“Really, dear. And we traveled one day, it was cold one day, and I went to a frozen lake. A frozen lake, you know? It was so white and it was so pretty and somewhere, somehow, you were there too. You, Dan, you,” she says. And Dan’s so fucking cuckoo that he’s wondering, should he fall, he’d get a concussion. “And you looked funny in your hat, with that scarf around your neck. You came with my friends and I to a little cottage because we were waiting out a storm and you read me your words. Your words that I asked for, your beautiful ones all twisted together. We went to the lake and you told me your stories and we laughed, we cried, we were okay and we weren’t and we slept on a concrete mattress.”

And Dan thinks she’s lovely, Dan thinks she’s so lovely. The sky is bleeding the fantasy in reality, the fiction in non, and his mind knits obsession over the way she looked sitting against the fourth wall with her wine and his husband. He whispers, “But how, Hélène? How did we read together? How did I tell you my stories and how did you listen?”

“Dan,” she breathes, and her chest stutters and stills. “You’re an artist, you’re a poet. You write tales, you write fantasy, you write me here and this universe this Paris and your friends your friends, your husband your husband. Don’t tell me you can’t write yourself there, don’t tell me you can’t do that.”

“I can do that, Hélène,” Dan says. The galaxies are bigger on his shoulders. “I can do that, I can write that.”

“Write me it then, dear,” Hélène asks, so crooked and so fragile in the places she’s strong. “Can you do it, do it right now? Close your eyes and clench your fists and write me my memory.”

And Dan is still terrified, Dan is still trembling, but he closes his eyes and he tightens his fingers and he can taste the smoke, can feel the cigarettes, but he isn’t in Paris. No Paris, no Paris. It’s heaven, it’s something like it, but it isn’t Paris.

He says, “The ocean is beautiful, so blue and so gentle. You say she’s a _she_ , you say she’s so wild but she’s so still and so wonderful and you’d like a boat, you’d like some distance. There was an ocean between us, Hélène, between you and I. And there was a storm, right in the corners of the sea, and the wind was so strong and the wind moved so fast. I wrote myself down on a paper plane and I set it into the grey, I set it into the storm. You promised to catch and you did and you promised to listen when I read you my tales and you did, you listened, you’re still listening. You shouldn’t ever stop listening. People don’t listen like you and people don’t talk like you and you have to keep talking, Hélène, you have to keep giving. I write and you give, we share and we split and we go both ways, we go two. Two because it’s your favourite and two because it’s mine, too. Somewhere, somehow.”

“What was the lake like, dear?” Hélène is whispering. There’s mist in her eyes, white amongst the black and white amongst the red. Dan discards the _dilated_ and discards the _bloodshot_ , discards the drugs and the drink and the pain and thinks only about heaven or the closest shit they have. 

“We went to the lake and it was white,” Dan’s staring at a slab of concrete down on the empty sidewalk. “It was white and it was cold and somebody had written the frost across the water, somebody had muddled up their words and written it across the trees. There were lines of blue and lines of nothing and it was poetry, even though we didn’t say it. I don’t remember if we said it, I don’t remember what it felt like. But my heaven is there, even if it isn’t. Like I was there, even though I wasn’t. A trip around Europe, you were on a trip around Europe. Busy and happy and big flying machines, you went on a big flying machine.”

“I did, I did,” Hélène says. Dan is still staring at the street but he can hear the smile in her voice. He can hear it like it had been newspaper print on his fingertips and he’d decided to smudge it across her tone. “A train and then a plane.”

And Dan thinks about Manchester Station, but he suffocates the memory. He chokes it, ties a puppet string around its throat and spits _not now, not now, I don’t want you right now._

“I travelled a lot and I loved it a lot, but I missed home. Wherever home is, I missed it,” Hélène continues, and Dan glances over to see a smile like a slope across her mouth. “My friends and I, we smuggled vodka in water bottles onto the plane. And I read some pretty poems, I said some silly things. You’d have laughed, Dan, we’d have flown together. And we’d have landed together, drank together. There was a party when I got home with a bonfire tangled with purple and orange and I was wrecked, I was fucking wrecked. I made eggs and slept on a mattress and missed my friends, I’d missed my friends from home.”

“I miss home, Hélène, I miss it too,” Dan tells her. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “I miss it and I know it and I try to go back, but it isn’t the same.”

“No?”

“No. It’s wrong and it’s dumb. They don’t like my stories, Hélène, they don’t like me. I’m not good enough.”

“You’re not good enough?” she echoes, then shakes her head. She’s resting it against the wall. “Who says, dear?”

“ _Them_ , Hélène.”

“Them,” Hélène nods and there’s a moment of uncertainty but she knows what she’s talking about, Dan thinks, she fucking knows. She talks and she talks and she knows and she talks some more. “Some things are simple, Dan. You know? You’re lovely like you are, flower. You’ll always be okay to me.”

“I’m okay, Hélène, I’m okay,” Dan whispers. Over and over and Phil fucked somebody else, his husband fucked somebody else and his husband is having a fucking child. Little bumps and tiny fingers. Ella, Ella, Ella. “My Phil doesn’t love me and my Phil doesn’t like me.”

“He doesn’t?” Hélène asks. “Why do you think that?”

“He doesn’t wear his ring no more.”

“No, love. I saw. He took it off, yeah? When did he take it off?”

“I can’t remember, Hélène,” Dan’s fingers start shaking again. “I-I can’t remember. He says he doesn’t love me, says he doesn’t like it. He loves Ella.”

“Ella?”

“She’s pregnant, Hélène,” Dan says. “She’s pregnant, Ella’s pregnant. Phil kisses her and Phil loves her and I wrote on his book, I wrote on his art. I don’t know how to make him happy no more.”

“Ella is—” Hélène has careful eyes. “She’s far away, is she?”

“She’s far away, Hélène, but she’s right here. Phil loves her, Phil wants her. She’s in his head and I’m not and I want to be, why can’t I be? I love him, Hélène. Always, I always do,” Dan’s smoking and hurting and he wants to see his mother. “Tell me a story. Can you tell me a story?”

“A story? About what, dear?”

“About you,” Dan says. The air is cool across his face. “I want to hear things about you. I like hearing things about you.”

“I talk about me too much,” Hélène insists. “Too much about me, not enough about you. I don’t want to talk about me again, Dan.”

“No, no,” Dan’s voice gnaws on a plea. “I want to hear about you, Hélène, please tell me about you. You’re a film student, you like film. You like the ocean and you like stories and you like poems, you like alcohol.”

“I start a lot of sentences with _I_ , Dan.”

”That’s okay,” Dan tells her. He’s sick and he’s smoking. “I start them with connectives, so people don’t know. A connective is a mask, Hélène. People don’t know, people don’t care. I can be what I want to be, I can be what I’m not. Please me about you, I want you to tell me about you.”

And Hélène is watching the horizon for the beginning of the sky or the beginning of sea when she says, “I don’t love a lot.”

“You don’t love a lot.”

“I don’t,” she admits. Her shirt folds over her thighs, black and long and pretty. “I’m a positive nihilist. Life is pointless, Dan, life and death and everything in between but we can enjoy that. The pointlessness. I keep myself busy a lot, work myself off my feet.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still.”

Dan doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t think he has to. The character is the author and the friends are the friends. There’s an oddity to space and the shit it’s written with, the shit it lives with. Aliens and constellations and moons and Orion.

_My favourite, my favourite, it’s my favourite, did you know?_

“I’m not very busy, Hélène,” Dan says.

“You are,” Hélène reaches across and touches the man’s temple. “This keeps you busy, dear. It keeps you up at night, keeps you working hard. You think and you create and you breathe, you are. Paris is so wonderful, your Paris is so wonderful.”

“What’s your Paris, Hélène? Where is it, what is it? Is it alright?”

“It is,” she says. The sky is black, but it’s never been prettier. “It’s a thousand things, a thousand and one. A bottle of champagne, a movie and some time and some friends and some tales and some of this, some of that. Some strength, some anger. Some guilt and some peace and some frost and some sun. Pink clouds, black clothes. It’s that lake and my ukulele and a play in my underwear, a place a little distance from my house. It’s a factory thing, something like that, and it’s beautiful in the summer. There’s a spot you can sit and drink beer and watch the sky.”

“Really, Hélène?”

“Really, love. You take your heart and your drink pushed in a backpack and you climb the fence, you get right over. I wish I could show you, I wish you could come.”

“I can come, Hélène, I can—I can write myself there again, I can wait for a storm and I can send another plane and—”

“No, dear, that wouldn’t work. Not this time, it wouldn’t. I need you to throw my backpack over for me, see?” Hélène smiles. “Two people. It has to be two.”

Two, two, two.

Dan breathes in and breathes out and there are omicrons in his eyes, omicrons in the air.

He’s fucking dumb and fucking stupid and his words are working good, words are tasting nice, but his stomach is aching and his throat is hurting and he’s eaten too much already. He tries breaking them down further, tries cutting them up and grinding his teeth but he’s sick and he’s silly and he should jump, he should push himself. He ruined his husband’s novel and smoked shit through his grandfather’s funeral and didn’t say goodbye to his mother and never fucking rang his father. His friends don’t remember his name, his parents don’t have to say it. His brother doesn’t have to know it and his husband doesn’t want to know it and his teachers never liked it, his mind likes to mock it.

He should jump for the shit he never did and the shit he wishes he hadn’t. For the inside of his closet, for the inside of the cabinet. For the pages and pages and words and phrases, addictions and afflictions and _fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._ For Phil Lester, for the writer, for the failure and the father and the mother and the child and the station with the train tracks, the empty stomachs and the broken ribs and the littered rooms in littered heads. And Dan doesn’t care for it all, but he should jump for the future. The next moment, the next day, the week after this and the week after that for his heaven has no heaven and his heaven no place in the place he knows he’s heading. Tiny babies, tiny bodies. Thumbs wrapped around fingers and arteries wrapped around wrists and Dan should fucking jump for his fucking husband’s stupid fucking child.

Because kids can be cruel.

And heads can be crueler.

And a bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times.

So Dan rhymes and Dan writes, Dan tries to put shit right with the slightest of fucking sanity in his messy, messy head. He’s got a window and two cigarettes and a ledge and a city. He’s got a sidewalk, he’s got a black sky. He’s got careful connectives connecting concrete and concussions, got skin and got bone and got heavy eyes, a heavy mind, a tenderness below his ribs and around the edges of his heart.

He’s got a terribly pretentious piece of shit they like to call _art_ and he likes to call _trying_ and they’re so fixated on the fact that he disagreed with them that they don’t even realise _he said the same fucking thing._

Dan should jump because they don’t get it.

He should jump because they don’t want to.

He should jump because Van Gogh killed himself and he was never fucking happy.

But, _God_ , Dan doesn’t jump. He doesn’t fucking jump and he doesn’t know why. Hélène is smiling at the horizon because she’s seen a boat, or some shit. Because it’s orange, or some shit. And Dan can’t fucking remember what the fuck she said, whether her heaven was alright or her heaven was just heaven and he can’t fucking remember the difference between the two.

Like he can’t remember the difference between orange and red, grey and black. Purple and blue and yellow and green and—

The door cracks open, cracks right through Dan’s head, and he shuffles himself far back on the sill. He brings a leg from the window and his knee brushes the ledge because he’s turning and he’s facing Louis and the man is so wonderful, the man is so kind. He’s got lines knitted into his forehead, Dan sees, and he’d quite like to write between them. 

“Dan, you need to go and talk to him,” Louis says. He’s calm, but he’s crumbling. He’s becoming chaotic and his eyes are the grey they’ve never been before, the grey of his mother’s Dan never saw. “You need to go, he’s calmer now. He’s calmed down. He’s just drunk and sad and angry and exhausted, so angry and exhausted. He wants to talk to you.”

“Is everything okay?” Hélène has turned too, and she helps lift Dan from the windowsill. He’s frail under her fingers.

“It’s fine, it’s—” Louis pinches the bridge of his nose and pushes his touch up over his eyebrows. “Well, it’s not. No, it’s not. But it will be, it should be, it’ll find a way to be. Do you have cigs?”

“Yeah,” Hélène says. “You can have two. Two is better than one and two is better than three.”

And Louis says, “Thanks,” as he heads across the carpet and gestures Dan to the shitty door. “Go talk to him, buddy. Go on, it’s okay. I wouldn’t let anything happen and neither would he. You need some time to talk to him.”

And then Dan is walking through the room, walking inside the walls, and he wants to scratch the fucking hotel from his eyes. Drain it from his blood, tear it from his head. He should have jumped for the wallpaper and jumped for the sheets, jumped for the TV and jumped for its screen. He’s thinking _Phil, Phil, Phil_ as he wanders out of the room, his scarred knuckles around the door frame and his small feet still in his shoes. There’s food in his stomach, some memories chugging in his head and two friends behind a wooden door. There’s the sound of it clasping shut, the sound of it touching the hinges and Phil’s sitting in the mess on the floor when he looks up.

He starts watching the ceiling, so cold and so cautious. He’s grey but he’s red and he’s red but he’s yellow and Dan wonders where the sunflower is, wonders if it’s okay.

“Hello,” he whispers. He’s five and he’s going to school, six snd asking a question. Fifteen and speaking to a girl and eighteen and speaking to a boy and not enough for everybody else, never enough for everybody else. “Lou said you were okay, Phil, Lou said you were calm. He said you wanted to talk and he said you were so drunk.”

“You ruined my book,” Phil slurs, but the emotions are gravestones dug and placed between syllables. They’re heavy and they’re permanent and there’s a cemetery across the men’s conversation. “You wrote on it and you ruined it. Ruined it, Dan, ruined it.”

“I’m sorry, Phil,” Dan whispers, strained. He finds his places on the floor and crosses his legs. He’s sat on his ankles. “Are you sick? I’m sorry.”

“I’m not _sick._ You’re the one that’s _sick._.”

“Yeah, Phil,” he manages. “I’m sick. Lou says so, my mom says so. My friends don’t talk to me no more and my mom doesn’t love me. I miss her and she doesn’t love me. Why doesn’t she love me, Phil? You don’t love me either, you love Ella and you don’t love me and you—”

“I don’t love Ella,” Phil grumbles. He looks strange without his hands around the bottle. “She doesn’t love me. I’m having a baby, Dan, a little baby. I can’t see it because she doesn’t love me and she doesn’t want me to love it. Did you know? I don’t love Ella and I don’t love you.”

“You don’t love me,” Dan echoes. There’s a blue thread coming from the edge of his pyjama sleeve and he loops it around his thumb, tugs on it. He’s eight and he’s in his school jumper, eight and it’s too big for him. He wants to vomit and he wants to scream, wants to drag metal over his veins so maybe he’ll bleed Phil and maybe he’ll bleed Hélène and maybe he’ll bleed the little visions of his mother in sunglasses from the front seat of the car. Sun on her shoulders, trickling through the glass. Her hands around the wheel and her hair pulled from her face and her red nails, pretty nails, perfect fucking edges. She was beautiful and she didn’t try, she never had to fucking try. In the first moments of the morning, in a dressing gown in the kitchen with her hip against the counter and her hand around the back of her neck. Mondays and Sundays, weekdays and weekends and splashes of tea up the front of blouses. Cuffs on blazers, crumbs on plates.

Dan’s mother doesn’t love him and Dan’s husband doesn’t either and he can feel it under his ribs, feel it in his chest. Coloured through his organs, coloured over his skin. There’s smoke in his lungs and food in the back of his throat and it tastes like home, tastes like those black clouds clotting the sky behind his shitty curtains. Condensation over the glass and tire tracks over the road, the cool breeze and the cooler rain and his brother’s shoes with the broken soles. And Dan can feel his husband when he breathes in, he can feel him when he breathes out. The air is tangled with alcohol and addiction and agony, repetition, some silence and some volume.

“I don’t want to love you,” Phil says, and he’s fucking spinning. Too fast or too slow. He looks beautiful in his grey shirt and beautiful against the wall, with streaks of vodka and streaks of red wine over his fucking figure. Saliva in the corner of his mouth, syrup soaked into the carpet. “I hate you and I . . . I don’t want you. Fuck you, Dan. Fuck you.”

But Dan doesn’t feel the words, doesn’t feel them like he should. Phil is tired and Phil is angry and Phil’s voice is cold and busy. Intoxicated, obsessed. There are hurricanes in the blue of his eyes, storms waging along the outskirts of the ocean and Dan thinks of tossing a plane for his friend, thinks of writing his pain down and folding it up. Like he’s in math class, alone at the back, and he’s using his words for ammunition because he knows nothing else. The ink is running and the walls are peeling and his book is curling, bending at the edges. His mind is too big for his skull, his hand is too big for his throat.

He says, “I’m sorry, Phil,” and it’s strained. Hoarse. Rough, scratched. His knees and his elbows, his shitty bike and his shitty friends and—

“You’re not,” Phil slurs. He shakes his head. “You don’t know how to be. You do it wrong, you do everything wrong.”

“I am, Phil. I promise I am, I promise I’m sorry,” And then he’s shaking, he’s shivering, sitting in the middle of the hallway. God gifted him fucking torture, fucking skin thin enough to slice through. Veins blue enough to bleed through, eyes wide enough to scream through. God gifted him needles and stitches and time, and God told him to fix himself like it was his fucking job. He hated him and he spat at him, he drove him from his parents and drove him from the church and drove him into substance abuse, into arms of addicts and tales of lunatics and _fuck you, fuck you, I don’t believe in your fucking salvation._ And Dan’s a writer and Dan’s a shit one, so he writes himself to frightened fingers around the folded corners of bible verses. He writes himself to bread and wine, to Noah’s Ark and second chances and hope and faith and peace. To a wife and a child, Christianity and bloody nails and away from this writing thing, so far away from this writing thing.

Gentle grace, a father and a place at the next service.

He wants to be an apology he knows how to feel so much more than he knows how to say, like he wants to be good and he wants to be okay but he’s mad and he’s sick and he’s thin and he’s weak. His fingers like his mouth, his nails like his wrist. His violence likes his mind.

“You’re so crazy and so dumb. I hate you for it all, I hate you for everything—” Phil is choking. “I fucking t-told you not to fall in love with me, you stupid fucking bastard. I fucking told you to k-keep your distance, to not touch me and not hold me and you didn’t listen, when do you ever listen?”

Parents evening. Passive aggressive. The fucking disappointment in the fucking waves of the fucking ride home. 

“I-I’m _sorry_ , Phil,” Dan sobs.

“You’re fucking _not_ , you’re fucking—” And he’s drunk, Phil is so drunk, but he sees the man and he sees the pain and he sees the shaking shoulders beneath the loose strips of fabric. Everything is red, everything is angry, and Dan wants to ask Hélène to film them their tale. Pain on the movie screen, flashes of fear and moments of silence and Phil shuffles on the carpet, moves his elbows across the floor. He slurs, “Dan, Dan, baby, no. D-Don’t, no—Come here.”

And Dan doesn’t know where _here_ is. He doesn’t know if he wants to. He’s thinking of his mother and her tight hands in the supermarket, her _shush_ and her _stop it_ , her _don’t talk to strangers and don’t follow them if they tell you to._ Nausea down the aisles, self-inflicted solitude, nerves like fingers of teenage lovers wrapped tight together. Tight and desperate, fixed and firm.

Dan is crying and there’s alcohol on the carpet. The hallway reeks of vodka or maybe it’s gin or maybe it’s whiskey or maybe it’s just the twenty first year, the _too much, please, you’ve had too much_ and the anger in the nothing because at least it’s fucking something.

Phil’s mumbling and slurring and grunting and whining, and he fists Dan’s sleeves as he sits there sobbing and pulls them together. “No, Dan, no,” he pleads, desperate and guilty. _Fuck you_ and _love you_ , _hate you_ and _love me._ Dan wants to go home and Dan doesn’t know how to get there and it’s Sunday, maybe, both too late and too early and too much and too little. He starts clawing at Phil’s arms but the man stays, the man clings, and he pulls Dan’s body down onto his lap.

Dan whimpers and it’s muffled by the shirt. He pushes his palms against the carpet and it’s damp, it’s cool. Everything is turning, everything is spinning, and Phil squeezes Dan as he sits up. 

There’s a jolt of pain around his hips from the pressure and he cries into the nothing. “P-Phil, don’t—It _hurts_ , please don’t—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Phil’s forcing his voice through intoxication. It’s dragging behind, heavy and bleeding and he holds Dan loose but strong against his chest. The scrawny man thrashes and thinks, thinks, thinks but his husband keeps him there, his husband breathes into his neck. “I d-don’t know how to be sorry either, Dan, I don’t but I am. I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry. Don’t c-cry, don’t cry for me.”

“You don’t l-love me, Phil, my mom doesn’t love me—” he chokes, fabric of Phil’s shirt all caught between his fingers. He’s eighteen and kissing him, mouth trembling and stomach suffering and they’re on the tiles in the middle of the kitchen. But it’s Paris, it’s a hotel. It’s empty and it’s silent and he’s crying in Phil’s arms. “Everybody h-hates me, nobody would cry i-if I—”

“No,” Phil snaps. He’s fighting the intoxication, fighting with desperation and fighting with concrete. Slabs of the stuff, shit he’s torn up from the sidewalk and shit he’ll sleep on, shit he’ll dream on. “People would cry, Dan, people would cry. Lou and Hélène. Lou and me, me so much.”

“Y-You’d cry, Phil, I don’t want you to cry—”

“We’d cry, sunshine, w-we’d cry—” The man shivers and stutters, stumbles over coherency. “I’d say sorry and I’d mean it and—and you should take your pyjamas o-off, you should shower and you should go home and you should g-give me my ring—”

“No, Phil,” Dan chokes. He hooks his hands under his arms and starts shaking his head. There’s a band of gold around a zero and a nine. “No, no, no ring. Don’t take m-my ring, please don’t take my—”

And Phil’s got alcohol running through his blood and addiction running under his skin and he’s mad, he’s so mad. Ocean eyes and pretty smiles and Hélène, Hélène, Hélène. Grey shirts, dirty syringes, a bag of weed and a mess on the carpet and _do I look prettier when I’m high, darling, do you think I look prettier?_

Phil wraps his hands around Dan’s left and tries to force his fingers over the ring.

So thin, too thin.

He’s pushing at the knuckles and pushing at the bones and Dan’s sobbing, Dan’s swearing, Dan can’t fucking breathe. He’s twenty six and they’re yelling and Phil’s fist is in the drywall before Dan’s is in his mouth and it’s the second time he’s done it, the second time he’s felt it. Bones and muscles and wrists and elbows. Twists in abdomens, distortions in frontal lobes and a crooked mirror, a crooked husband, a crooked friend. Dan was twenty six or twenty something when he stuffed his fingers down his throat like he stuffed his cash in his glovebox because drugs did not make him look pretty, drugs did not make anything look fucking _pretty._

And Dan’s life is a succession of things that feel a little less nice than that one thing before, that one thing you get drunk for and that one thing you get sick for and if he could go home for ten seconds, he’d find a way to post his self-pity a letter of _stop crying, you’ve seen nothing yet._

Phil Lester is trying to take Dan Howell’s ring off and Dan Howell is trying to find a way to work words, work syllables, work metaphors to depict his anger and his agony. Their marriage is written between the lines over his knuckles and the reminder of the zero, the reminder of the nine, the reminder that Dan Howell is not Dan Howell anymore than Phil Lester is Phil Lester. Because there’s a divorce in their obsession with the other’s obsession and Dan can’t write stories anymore than he can write a marriage.

He can’t write words anymore than he can write memories or paragraphs anymore than he can write years and they fucked on the floor, they fucked on the carpet, they fucked up their parents and fucked up their heads.

Blood smeared across the front of shitty trainers.

Bitten nails scratching down the skin of bleeding arms.

Dan’s sanity feels like moving your eyes too quickly in your sockets when your head is fucking aching. Left, right, up, down, torch-light over pupils and torch light over gums. White walls, white floors, _flush your fucking pills before they teach you how to swallow._

Phil is clawing at Dan’s knuckle—made from his fucking rib—when Dan shoves at his shoulders so he staggers back on the floor.

He slurs, “Fuck you, I hate you,” and Dan can taste blood through the clouds of smoke in his lungs. He can taste blood through the rings and violent gusts of winds and he’s going to be sick, he’s going to be fucking sick.

“I hate you,” he sobs. His ring has fallen and he holds it tight in his palm. Anger and tragedy, golden and beautiful and lovely, so lovely, so broken and so bloody. “I-I _hate_ you, Phil, I fucking _hate_ you and I—I don’t want you to—I w-wish you’d just—”

Dan thinks _hold me_ and _leave me._

Dan thinks _fuck you_ and _love you._

Dan whimpers, “I hate you,” and forces his mouth onto Phil’s.

Like he’s nineteen and he’s never touched him, he’s twenty and he’s never fucked him. He’s got his hands around the back of his neck and his fingers over the hem of his shirt and they’re married, they’re divorced, they hate and they love. The day is the night, the writer is the painter, the water is the fire and the road is the ark. Dan touches him like he’d touch the bible, with sin in his fingertips and faith across the pages and his tongue tastes like chocolate, his tongue tastes like cinnamon. Careful fingers over frightened ears, bleeding pens between shaking knuckles and gentle mouths over softer hips. Stretches of skin, segments of sanity. Dan is drunk and Dan is high and Phil’s mouth is whiskey, Phil’s lips are wine.

He’s holding Dan to his chest and his touch is cool over his collarbone when he dips his hand under his pyjamas. A sound comes from the back of his throat and Dan kisses him so hard, closes his eyes so tight. He’s crying and he’s panting and he’s as fucked up as Paris when he whines, “I love you, Phil, I love you, I love you—”

And he’s shaking on his husband’s lap, trembling against his husband’s mouth. It’s home and it’s heaven and it’s hell and it’s nothing. But Dan loves him, Dan fucking loves. God, Dan fucking loves him.

Phil chokes, “Dan,” then, “No, baby, stop—”

And he’s pushing him away, scurrying back against the wall.

Jesus isn’t there and Jesus doesn’t care and there’s alcohol soaked into the carpet, alcohol soaked into Dan’s gums. He wants to kiss him and love him and hold him and push him. Kick him, punch him. Draw blood from his veins, draw words on his novels.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

Hélène plays ukulele and Hélène prefers to strum on a balcony and Hélène says she’d like to stick happy thought to the back to Dan’s eyes with a shitty gluestick.

Says he’s the belt that keeps her organs from spilling and the hand that reaches up into the cage of her heart.

“Don’t touch me,” Phil spits. Dan doesn’t fucking try. “Don’t touch me and don’t look at me and—Fuck you, just _fuck_ you—”

Dan is terrified for the fleeting moment the air is just silent. But then the door of the room opposite theirs or opposite the one he thinks is theirs breaks open with a force and there’s a man standing there with a rage knitted into his expression.

Red, red, red.

Dan thinks of Hélène, thinks of his friend, but she’s never going to be the kind-of red that his head is frightened of.

“What in _God’s_ name is wrong with you?” The man seethes at them. “Who the _hell_ do you people think you are, making all this fucking noise? Screaming and smashing shit and—”

“Fuck off,” Phil growls. He’s angry and exhausted. Dan kissed him and it tasted like heaven, but he doesn’t believe in aliens and he doesn’t believe in God.

“ _Excuse_ me?” The man’s jaw is clenched. Dan’s staring at his husband and the air is so heavy, the air is so dangerous. It’s the eighteenth year and there’s a fight in a club, a punch and a scream and some blood on Phil’s lip. “This is a _hotel_ and you’re shouting the bloody place down. There are children trying to sleep, people trying to work. Who the hell are you two? What the hell is the matter with you?”

The man shuts his hotel door and says, “I’m going to the fucking reception, I’m not standing for this.”

“No, no,” Dan is sitting on the floor and he reaches to wrap tiny hands around the man’s leg, then up to his arm. “You can’t do that, mister, you can’t—”

The man thrashes the lunatic from his body and he falls back onto his elbows. Bones and ribs. So thin, too thin.

“What the fuck?” Phil’s tone comes red, comes bleeding at all the corners and pulling at all the threads and Dan feels his hands on his shoulders but he can’t fucking look at him. Angry, angry.

_You’re ruining this, you’re ruining us._

They’re teenagers and Phil gets mad over all the shit he shouldn’t. Phil can’t think and Phil can’t speak and Phil uses his fists on the situations in which he doesn’t know how to control himself.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” he’s slurring. “Fuck you, who the fuck are you? Don’t touch him, don’t ever fucking touch him.”

And the man is still wild, the man is still irritated, but he’s not looking through the same eyes as he was before. Dan’s a writer and he writes him calmer. But it’s shitty, so he writes him warier. He says, “You’re drunk and you’re pathetic. The pair of you, you’re pathetic. Are you grown men? Is that what you are? I’m going to the fucking _reception_ —”

And it’s so quick, it’s so sudden. Phil’s fisting his collar and slamming him against the wall before Dan can recall the chaos and the fury, his husband’s temper so tricky and treacherous. So terrible and so touchy, as if he’s got reflexes wired through his emotions and his subliminal thoughts are only ever red. Never blue, never orange. Phil is an angry man and Phil is a sad man and Dan could rhyme about how _his_ Phil has only ever been somebody who kisses the corner of his mouth and runs their thumb of his veins but he’s not a liar, he’s not a liar who can help it. His Phil is angry and his Phil is sad, just as much as his Phil is the happiness worked into the weak hours of weekend mornings.

He’s turmoil and he’s mayhem. His anger is anarchy and he’s off his fucking face. 

He slams the man into the wall and lifts his knee to wind beneath his ribs, kick at that place where his stomach ends and his chest begins and he splutters, “Fuck you, who are you?“

A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times.

Dan is crying again and he wants Hélène. He wants her stories and he wants Lou’s mother and he wants his friends, he doesn’t want this man. Maybe his mouth and maybe his hands and maybe his head, but not his madness and not his red.

Not the shit you have to have to have somebody.

The man spits an insult at Phil and Phil kicks him again, forcing him down onto the beige-stained carpet. Dan can’t remember how he wrote it, can’t remember what he meant by it. But his husband is so empty and his husband is so angry and his husband lays a punch across the side of this man’s face. Black. Blue. Red and purple bruising, red and messy cuts. Too much and not enough, not being allowed to have enough of a lover’s toxic behaviour. 

“Phil,” Dan cries. He heaves himself up and tries to pull the man away. “Phil, please, Phil—Don’t hurt him, Phil, stop it—”

“Get off me, fuck off me,” Phil shoves him back but clings to his pyjama shirt and his fingers clench of the fabric like he’s trying to find his aliens. He’s trying to find his galaxy, he’s trying to find his Orion. He punches the man again and again and Dan’s head is going over and over the shit, pausing and playing and _give me some speed, give me a fix._

There’s a storm but it’s blown all the paper away. And even if it hadn’t, Dan isn’t sure he remembers how to make a fucking paper plane. But if he did, if he found a way, he’d write _help me_ across the inside and send it off to his friend. As if the only way he’s ever been able to communicate is with some letters and some punctuation because his letters and his punctuation are art and are genius. They’re excellent and they’re skilful, but they’re shitty and they’re mad. They’re never not nothing and never just something and nobody gifted Dan anything but a Paris set and some thoughts to run through it.

He’s sobbing when Phil stops hurting the man and there’s blood on the plaster of the wall. White. Skeletons.

Come hell or high water.

“L-Look, Phil, look what you—”

But Phil is moving and Phil is panting. He’s drunk and delusional and Dan is damned if he doesn’t follow him and damned if he does. So he’s back there in the hotel room, back there behind the door. There’s a man on the floor and violence up the wall and Louis is smoking with Hélène on the windowsill. Yellow, orange, red. The city’s skyline is busier than it’s ever been and Louis stops talking, kicks his feet off the sill.

“What’s happened?” he asks, immediately. His mother had grey eyes and he didn’t finish his drawing. “Dan, what happened?”

Dan is watching Phil when he walks over to the bed and starts shifting the sheets, searching for some shit. He says something and Dan is still crying.

“Dan,” Louis repeats, firmer. Orange, orange, orange. “What did he do?”

“Has something happened, love?” Hélène clambers down from the window also, lock clasped back down. She’s so pretty, Dan thinks, so pretty and so lovely and Louis is so kind. There’s traces of red on the sheets where Phil’s fingers are fumbling and Hélène sees them first, heads over to him first. “Phil, what have you—Why is your hand bleeding? What happened to you? Can I see it, can I look?”

But Phil’s just muttering and Phil’s just mumbling. It doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything. He says something about his book and he staggers over to the bedside table, bloody fingers around the drawers.

“Jesus, fuck,” Louis curses. “Why are you bleeding? Fucking hell, why are you—Dan, why is he bleeding? Why are you crying? _Dan._ ”

“H-He hurt him, Lou,” Dan sobs. “I kissed him and he hurt him and I-I want to go home, I want to—”

“You kissed him? Who did he hurt?” Louis is frantic. Pills and records and shitty fucking curtains. “Dan, buddy, who did he hurt?”

“A-A man, Lou, a man outside and—”

And then Louis is moving too quick for Dan’s eyes, too quick for Dan’s mind. The door goes and then goes again and Hélène is staring at the red on the sheets, staring at the delusional men.

Two, two, two.

“We need to go,” Louis says. The door is loud, heavy on his entrance. “Fuck, we need to get the hell out of here.”

“What?” Hélène says.

“He’s beaten the fucking guy, he’s laying there and he’s—We have to go before somebody sees and calls the police,” Louis starts moving around the room, reaching for the bags and reaching for the cigarettes and stuffing shit under the zippers.

“Where are we going, Lou?” Dan whimpers. “No, no, I don’t want to go. I-I want to stay here, why can’t we stay here—”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Phil slurs. He’s stumbling around the room with blood over his hands.

“Shut up, Phil,” Louis snaps. “Jesus, you’ve—Why would you do that to him? Why would you—We have to go, we can’t stay.”

“But I don’t _want_ to go, Louis!” Dan yells over the careful chaos.

“Dan, please,” Louis rubs his hands over his face. “Please, I have to help you. If we don’t leave now, if we—Hélène, God, help me get their shit. Please, just help me.”

And so Hélène helps and Dan cries and Phil moves and Louis speaks. And it goes on and on, over and over and over. Man on the floor, violence up the wall.

Dan sees the blood over his husband’s knuckles and the storms waging in his pupils and he wants to vomit, he wants to scream. The print on his shirt in Manchester station and the gentle roll of the waves, the tender brushes of his eyelashes.

“I-I want Hélène to come, Lou,” Dan cries, when the sunset starts shifting him out of the room. Phil is pacing, incoherent and insane. “I want her to come, let her come—I’m not g-going unless she goes, too.”

“She can, you can,” Louis turns to her. “It’s so fucked up, we’re so fucked up. But you can, you can come.”

“Where are you going?” she asks, soft. She has her hand on the small of Dan’s back and Louis is forcing Phil towards the door. Little luggage, too much baggage.

A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times.

“We’ll have to get a bus,” Louis says. “Stop off at my apartment, pick up some cash. First bus we can catch, first bus away from here. It’ll be fine, it’ll be okay. Fleeing in the middle of the night is second nature to me.”

Hélène nods her head and smooths a circle over Dan’s spine. “Okay, yeah, okay. I don’t have to be anywhere. I’m in.”

And Dan thinks about the lake, thinks about the ocean. He thinks about their planes and thinks about their music and thinks about their dreams. Words and stories and passages and sentences. Gentle voices down shitty receivers.

Phil is mad and Dan is mad.

There’s a man on the floor and police lights are red and blue and they fucked up, they fucked it up. They’ll sleep on concrete, leave the skeleton door frames. Dan should have jumped for his husband’s mouth and his husband’s angry fists. He should have jumped for his friends and the blood smeared on the sheets and the trips around Europe, the sobs soaked into the back of his throat.

Hélène says, “Just don’t look at it, darling, look at me,” when they’re vacating the room.

No more bathrooms, no more single beds. No more windows and no more cigarettes and no more heaven, no more hell.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally don’t even know what to say here. I need to go back and edit some parts, add some things, but I’ve got a raging fucking headache and I really don’t have the energy right now. Phil is insane, Dan is insane. Louis is rational in an irrational situation. And Hélène, Hélène is my favourite. She’s my literal favourite. The little pieces, the little nothings. The things she says, the way she treats Dan. She’s beautiful, she’s red, she’s different. Why do you think she’s so important? What is it about her that’s so important to the story? And why does Dan love her so much? Why does she care so much for him? Let me know what you thought, this was so fucked upppp


	16. Escobar

**number sixteen: escobar**

_Phil_ drank so much alcohol on Christmas Eve of the twenty fourth year that he had to go to hospital. And Dan spent the first hours of Christmas Day writing poems in the waiting room about the way the lights looked from behind the glass of the ambulance, the way the vomit looked when it was soaked into the slush and the snow. He spent the first hours of Christmas Day with fear knotted into the muscles cramped under his ribs because his husband was sick and his husband had eyes that said he’d relapsed six times. His husband had eyes that said he’d tried to pour his alcohol down the sink but only got as far as the neck of the bottle and he still has eyes that say he used to think he’d grow up to be an actor in a movie of people who don’t give a fuck.

Eyes that say he’s got a list of men he never wants to see again.

Eyes that say he stamps his letters with a press of his palm against the corner.

Eyes that say he’s leaving some sort-of home when they clatter down the Paris streets at one or two or three. Or four or five, for the sun is soft on the horizon like the wallpaper is soft on the wall. Floral prints, flowers patterned into the plaster. Phil Lester has eyes and Phil Lester has a smile and Phil Lester is stumbling over the concrete with his feet before his head, his heels over the curbs. He’s worn at the edges, Dan thinks, got skin that looks like the pages of a novel folded and unfolded too many times. He’s got streaks of blood caught under his fingernails and he’s bruising like he’s the sky on the twenty fourth Christmas Eve, with purple stained over all the white.

Dan wants to kiss him so hard he can’t breathe and their lungs give up like a sixty-seven year-old smoker’s, smoking for his children’s mistakes and the fact his wife knows where another’s man’s chest ends and stomach begins. Smoking for the fights he shouldn’t have got involved in, for the weekend he spent in California because the sun just doesn’t shine like it used to. And if Dan Howell kissed Phil Lester, he’d kiss him like he spoke when they told him to shut up and touch him like he did before he decided to cut all his fingers off and—

“I don’t know how much I’ve got saved in my apartment,” Louis says. He’s so kind and so orange, so one thing and then another and Dan doesn’t know if he’s ever going to finish his drawing. Dan doesn’t know if he’s ever going to think he deserves him. Three episodes ago and not enough left. “Enough for a ride away from here, enough for us to leave.”

He’s talking to Hélène or something, because she’s there and she’s responding and she’s walking quick over the pavement. Concrete, concrete. “I can pay for myself, Louis, it’s fine. Don’t worry about me. I don’t have a lot, but I can probably pay for Dan too. Can you take care of Phil?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Thank you, that’d help. You travel a lot?”

“I try,” she tells him. A voice like the sun fell asleep behind it and never woke up again. “I try to do a lot of shit. Make a memory out of everything, me.”

And Dan’s too busy thinking about how much he’d rather be dead to think about the memories Hélène’s head has written out on restaurant-napkins and stuck to the inside of her skull. He’s too busy being selfish, too busy being himself. He doesn’t know where his first finger ends and his second begins and he doesn’t know the difference between his thumbnail on his right hand and his thumbnail on his left. He doesn’t know why he spends his time alliterating pain when his poignancy is just the product of self-pity and pretentious poetry. He doesn’t know why he’s walking down a street and why he can taste Phil in his throat when he coughs and why Paris looks prettier when he’s crying about the things he doesn’t know.

There are cars on the road, all headlights and changing speeds and ambulances sound different when they sound on Christmas Eve. Through lovers, through shots, through blood and sex and slanted roofs and Dan’s Phil is the Phil who told him a poem about the snow pushed to the sides of the road whilst he was laying on the stretcher. Alcohol in his blood but affection in his eyes, footprints under street lights lit dim through the harsh winter and _look at me, baby, look how sad I am._

Phil’s too drunk to know how sad Dan is. And Dan’s too sad to know how sad Phil is. Like he’s too sad to write his story, he’s too sad to admit that he thought the drawer with medication in his mother’s room was too close to the bathroom because he saw it every time he exited and every time he’d contemplated counting the seconds he could hold his breath under the murky bath water. He’s too sad to admit that he thought it was too close because it was too easy and he doesn’t like things easy in the same way he doesn’t like his inability to explain why the word _darkness_ is more terrifying than a bedroom at one in the morning.

Dan Howell is too sad to admit that he wishes he’d been good at math. He wishes he’d have learnt how to train his mind to tackle equations, to rearrange numbers rather than letters because a number is just a number but a letter is an emotion. A letter is a name, a letter is an identity. Whilst a number is an age, a letter is a prescription for the things that he feels and the things that he wishes he knew how to control because he’s too sad to admit that he can’t.

He can’t fucking do anything.

He doesn’t fucking feel anything.

He’s too busy thinking about how much he’d rather be dead to think about how many words he has to scribble for his hand to cramp up. How many times he has to tell them he wants to slash his arms and pulls his veins out for them to realise that he’s not okay, that he’s never fucking been okay. They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy but they say he looked ugly with it all over his lips like they say Dan Howell looks ugly with adjectives all over his hands. All down his legs, around his thighs, between his ribs and under his shoulders and he’s got space pyjamas he’s not ever going to fucking take off because they make him think of his parents and his husband’s first drafts.

He is hand soap after saliva, sink water after vomit. He is the creator of his own catastrophe like he is loose cords of headphone wires and the light that feeds colour through a chapel’s stained glass windows. He is a busy stomach, a muddled head. He is a play he plays unrehearsed and bedsheets tucked in at the corners and writing for people he can’t remember the names of, can’t remember the colour of. He knows that today isn’t real and tomorrow never happened and he is something in the middle of them like he is something in the middle of his sadness and his happiness. And he is something in the middle of that and its opposite. 

Hélène says, “Dan, love, why are you crying? Don’t cry, hey—You don’t have to cry, it’s okay.”

They’re sitting on a curb. Louis isn’t there and Phil isn’t there and there’s a man in a car parked across the road with his head in his hands.

“I d-don’t like it here, Hélène,” he whimpers. The wind is coolest early morning.

“That’s okay,” she tells him. She’s got her bag on her lap. “We’re going now, we’re leaving. Louis’ getting the cash for a bus ride. Do you like bus rides?”

“I don’t know,” Dan sobs. “Hélène, I don’t know. I can’t r-remember, I can’t remember anything.”

“Sure, you can,” Hélène says. Whispers, over the breeze. Dan’s thin arms are cold under his sleeves. “You remember Phil, you remember your husband. You remember the things you said and the places you went. You remember that you’re a writer and that he is, too.”

“He got drunk o-on Christmas Eve, Hélène,” Dan’s crying and he’s sure the man in the car is, too. “He got so drunk and so sad and so white, it w-was all so white. He told me a poem, he made it all pretty.”

“Yeah? What was the poem, dear? Do you remember that?”

“No,” Dan shakes his head. “Something about the way t-the sky looked grey at the edges even though it was all black and the way the Christmas lights reminded him of better times because his mother u-used to kiss his head before she lifted him to put the angel on the tree. And t-they always had the decorations up too early, Hélène, his poem was about that. About wearing hoods indoors and gloves on hands and scarves a-around throats but never too tight. Phil said he loved the twenty fifty but didn’t like the twenty fourth because it reminded him o-of the time his parents fought too much a-and he sat on some motorway listening to records with his father. It was Christmas Eve and it was so cold. He was nine, or something, he was little. They didn’t n-need to talk about the snowstorm or the calls from his mother or how he knew a man had jumped from the bridge a couple miles from where they were sitting six months ago. Phil was a baby, my Phil was a baby, and h-he told me the colour of December reminded him of how his father had said that Santa came first to those needed him the most.”

Hélène is smiling, and her voice is gentle. “And what happened, love? On Christmas Eve, when he was drunk.”

“He—” Dan starts whimpering again and puts his hands to his face. He’d rather be dead. “He drank too much, Hélène, he was sick and he’s still sick. I r-rode in the ambulance with him, I wrote about the lights and the curtains and the trees and how I didn’t belong to anyone, I never belonged to anyone. I wrote about the b-beer on his breath and the machine they tied him to and the little boy in the waiting room. The little boy with the broken arm and the mother with the sad eyes.”

“Why were they sad?” Hélène whispers.

Dan wonders how many people he knows without ever really knowing. “I don’t know, I don’t know why they were sad. She was sad, so sad and so pretty. She had a man who put his hands where he shouldn’t, or something, or a child in her tummy she didn’t want to be there. She had a dead mother or a dead father or no food on the table, no money in the bank. She hadn’t kissed anybody for too long and she missed the placed around her husband’s elbows that she clung to when he ran his fingers down her scraggly sides. She missed her childhood and she missed playing out in thunderstorms just to dry off before the fire. She missed jumping into the deep end and tasting chlorine in the back of her throat and putting her hands in her mother’s heels, her fingers in a tub of ice cream. And she loved her son but she wished it was nine months before he was born because she missed going to bed with nothing to wake up for.”

Hélène doesn’t say anything and Dan is thinking about this woman’s eyes and thinking about this woman’s clothes when he continues, “The cast on his arm reminded her of the time she pushed her cousin and he fell funny. It reminded her of a mistake, it made her feel like shit. Because she was sleeping when he did it, or something, she wasn’t there to keep him safe or there to be his mother. She was sorry for the things she shouldn’t have been sorry for. And I think all the greatest people often are, Hélène, the ones that go around apologising for the cracks in the things they didn’t break. She was sad and she was sorry and she looked like she’d never slept, looked like she’d tried too hard. She had a little boy that liked to rest his head against her shoulder and hold her hand when he was frightened and he knew nothing about the world but that it began with the lines indented in her palm and ended with the silhouette around the shape of her shoulders when she slept facing the bedroom wall because she couldn’t sleep with the bathroom light. She couldn’t sleep without her child clinging to her back. And she looked like a blizzard, Hélène, you know those kind-of women? Those kind-of girls?”

Hélène nods slight and certain, but there’s a distance to her eyes. She’s got this almost-upturn to her lips and her hands are around her bag.

“The ones you watch hidden away if you don’t want to get hurt and the ones that take all your sheets of paper if you open your window wide enough. She had eyes that said she’d lost her mind for a while and she’d lived in the city her whole life, or something. She didn’t like her boss and she fell too hard in love and she noticed that I was crying and writing stuff on my arms but she didn’t notice that I wanted her to smile at me. I wanted her to smile at me, Hélène, I wanted—” Dan’s voice dwindles, and then he’s starting on the man in the car. He’s smoking a cigarette. “Do you see him? Have you noticed him? He’s a bit funny looking, a bit strange and crooked. Don’t you think so? He’s in love with his best friend and he doesn’t know how to tell him. He doesn’t know how to entertain the stretches of silence with confessions of sexuality because he doesn’t want to be in the circus, he doesn’t want to be replaced. He’s sick and suicidal, got the things they said to him and the things they made him do written all over his psyche, all down the back of his neck and around the sides of his chest. He doesn’t like his stomach and he doesn’t like his thighs and he sort-of wishes he could live in the mountains with blizzard-women and little lions cubs.

He’s the empty spaces in a cathedral and the last bottle of wine and he’s ten thousand wishes past wishing for a better life because he knows he could live ten thousand and not be the person he is right now. I’d probably fall in love with him if I talked to him, you know, I’d probably fall in love with him. I’d tell him poems and write him songs and he’s the kind of-guy who kisses with his hands because he doesn’t fear the placement of his lips, he fears the probability that he’ll touch somewhere without a pulse. And, fuck, Hélène, he looks like my father after he saw pictures of himself in the years before he touched my mother. When he realised the time before her was a time he could smile without thinking about hers, too. And this man, he knows that the worst fucking thing in the world is having a happiness dependant on somebody else. Something else. A lover or a friend or a pill or the weather. He knows it, Hélène, I know that he knows it. His parents were distant relatives or his friends were fucking enemies or he asked and they didn’t answer, he spoke and they didn’t respond. It rained all through summer and snowed all through spring and they had heatwaves in December, right up until new year. He gets things because he had no choice but to get them and he’s the person who lays with you on cold bathroom tiles when you’ve got a migraine. He’s the person who traces words on your lower back and asks you what he just told you and the person who can’t watch a movie without thinking about what happened when they turned the camera off. He’s something like that, Hélène. Just something like that.”

And the breeze is so distant, the wind is so still. It’s too early to be early morning in Paris but Dan doesn’t know alternative words, in the same way he preaches his sadness because he doesn’t know how to describe it as anything else. Hélène breathes a soft breath into the air and then she shakes her head and she says, “How do you get that? How do you get that from a stranger in a car? You don’t even know his name and you think about the way he falls in love before you even think to give him one.”

“They don’t need names,” Dan whispers. “People, my people. Everybody has a name, but not everybody has the things they do.”

“Your people,” Hélène echoes. “What do you mean?”

“My people, the people I write. The people I write in the places I write, writing the things I write them to write,” he’s talking and he’s stopped crying. He doesn’t when he did. “My people are colours and feelings and memories. They’re lists of nouns and desires distances away and fates so fucked up, chests so empty. Alcohol and blood, toxicity and violence and mutilation and death. But sensitivity and grace, too. All of that, tangled together and sugar coated but stripped down of all its superficiality. I don’t know what my writing is, Hélène. Not good enough.”

“Not _good_ enough?” There’s frustration in the neat lines of her forehead, smoothed out over the skin. “You’re a tortured poetic soul and you speak like you wrote the world the way it is, how can the only shit you come up with be _that_? Your writing isn’t _that_ , you know it isn’t.”

“It is, Hélène,” Dan tells her. He starts drumming his trainers against the concrete. Mattresses and coloured skies and over and over and over. “It is that.”

“No, just—” she shuts her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t say it like you, but it’s something like rain on windows. Your writing is rain on windows. It’s feet together and thighs part and teeth in gums and organs in chests. It’s not ‘not good enough’, you ass, don’t give me that. It’s everything and nothing, puddles and lampposts and mountains that would sound like old men if they spoke. It’s how pain is supposed to be and how love is supposed to feel, concealed in nooks and crannies and if somebody asked you to tell them what love was, I know you wouldn’t even need the word _kiss_. Because your writing is the quiet in the emotions too loud to hear a thing and your writing is milk spillages and coffee blemishes and storms in the corners of capital cities. It’s paper clips, it’s fingertips, it’s—”

“Homesick,” Dan mutters, and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know how. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“Homesick, yeah. Beautiful and homesick.”

And Dan smiles then, like Vincent’s put his brush to his mouth. “I’m Hemingway.”

Hélène laughs. “Yeah, yeah. Hemingway. That one, I know that one.”

“Do you?”

She shakes her head and rests her face down on her bag. “No.”

Dan’s amusement is there through the cool breeze, coming between the rushes of wind over the heat of his skin. The man in the car starts the vehicle and drives off somewhere down the street in the middle of, “He was a writer, Hemingway was a writer. A good one, Hélène, real good. Phil can read stories, you know? He reads them so well. He does all the voices and everything, makes it all up in his imagination. He used to read to me all the time, when I was sad and scared.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. _Don Quixote_ and Noah’s Ark. If you ask him, he can read to you too.”

“You think so, love?” she smiles. “That’d be nice, yeah. And Phil, you—You love him, don’t you? You love him for that. His through the passages, his eyes over the page. His voice vibrating in your ear against his chest. You don’t have to love him for everything, like how he doesn’t love you. But you’re in love with the way he reads and he’s in love with the way you listen. It’s a sequence, of sorts. Some things are simple, Dan. We have to let them be.”

And Dan thinks about record players, thinks about The Beatles and thinks about pretty sounds and thinks about saying _thank you_ , before Louis is there behind him.

He’s walking over the pavement with a hand fisted around Phil’s shirt, spitting, “I don’t _care_ , Phil. I don’t care what happened. You’re off your fucking face and we have to leave, we have no choice but to leave.”

“Hey,” Hélène is stood up, when Dan hears her voice. She’s got her bag slung back over her shoulders. “Did you get the cash? Has he done something?”

“I got it, yeah. In my pocket,” Louis nods. “It’s not much, but it’s enough. I’ll just shoot up a bank or something, if shit gets too real.”

Hélène smiles. “I told you, I can help out. We need cash for the ride to wherever, and then a hotel. Right?”

“Yeah, something like that. But after what happened,” Louis’ voice is thinner and Phil is mumbling, unstable on his feet. “I don’t know how I feel about staying anywhere too long. I washed the blood from Phil’s hands, cleaned him up a bit. And Dan has to eat, he hasn’t for long enough. Feels like an eternity.”

Dan’s heart bleeds, just for a moment, through the words of number one. The desk in his bedroom and the paintings on his wall and waiting at eternity’s gate, sleeping on toxic arguments. A pregnant woman and Dan’s husband having coffee in their living room. London in the distance with a skyline soft and sleepy.

“You have to _eat_ , baby, you have to eat,” Phil tries to reach for him, but Louis leads him away. Straight down the street, straight through the time Dan doesn’t know just before early morning. It’s four strides over slabs of concrete, four pairs of shoes and four fucked-up brains and Dan’s been through two and been through three so he ties his arteries around four and writes a poem about its significance.

Four streetlights.

Four windows in the next apartment.

Four petals on the sunflower crushed against the side of Louis’ bag.

Homesick, homesick, homesick.

Dan tries his best not to give a shit, for he can’t go back but even if he could, he’s not sure he’d feel like it. He’s not sure it’d do much good.

Like he’s not sure his mother even invited him to his grandfather’s funeral and he’s not sure it’s early morning, he’s not sure he’s got his ring on his finger. He doesn’t know Phil Lester from his husband or his husband from Phil Lester and he just prefers the one who fucking listens to him. Who kisses him, with their mouth and not their hands because they’re messy and they’re not what love’s about. They’re not what heaven’s about, but not what hell is either. They’re one thing and its opposite and then what comes between the two and Dan’s clinging to every trace of smoke and Phil’s saliva on his tongue as they walk through the city. Blood on the plaster, violence up the wall. The hotel is red and Dan’s skeleton is restless under his skin.

He feels sick.

He’s not good enough.

His teeth feel strange in his gums and people never notice anything.

There’s a little bus stop on the corner somewhere, with nobody but a woman waiting. She’s dressed in a formal blouse and got this blazer with cuffs and she’s buttons and zippers and cotton, materialism. She’s strength and she’s courage, but only in the places she knows.

Dan smiles at her and she smiles back, even after the space pyjamas.

She’s nice for that.

He likes her for that.

But he’s told so many stories, he can’t remember where he left his own.

“We’re just traveling, Phil,” Louis says, hushed and hesitant. “Shush now. God, please, shush now.”

“ _Louis_ —”

“Shh,” Louis shakes his head, and shuffles into the intoxicated man. An arm around his shoulder, a hand against his back. Phil Lester isn’t a man for affection in the way Dan Howell is because Phil Lester would prefer to be left alone when Dan Howell would prefer to be held. Phil Lester would prefer to yell when Dan Howell would prefer to whimper. They’re a little bit different, a little bit crooked. Moved, shifted, just slightly out of place. And Dan used to tell himself they could work on it but he isn’t so sure anymore, he isn’t so sure on them. His head is a succession of delusion after delusion and Phil is a man addicted to addiction, addicted to bottles and addicted to their liquor.

Dan loves him and he hates him and he wishes he’d kiss him like he’d tasted vodka on the inside of his lip. All up over his gums and down his fucking throat because he wants Phil to make love to him in the way he does substance.

There’s a bus after a little while, and Dan’s in his eleventh year with strangers and his packed lunch. His mother’s left him a note wishing him the best of luck and he’s fiddling with his buttons, he’s fiddling with his hair. He pulls at a curl and smiles at a girl and pushes his shoulders back because his father told him he couldn’t fight anything slouching as much as he did. And the bus is some shade of some colour he can’t remember, some colour it’s not too important he’s forgot. He sat with shaking knees and shaking fingers and the boys up front sneered when he shuffled past their attention and—

Writing, writing, writing.

Homesick, homesick, homesick.

Dan’s never going to sit on the windowsill with his friend ever again.

Dan’s never going to hear The Beatles on the player ever again.

He’s sitting next to his husband and there’s orange and there’s red behind them. They’re on a bus, they’re not eleven. Not eighteen or twenty or happy or sad and Paris is grey, Paris is stirring.

Paris is the inside of Dan’s head.

Go figure.

People never notice anything.

“I fucked up, Dan,” Phil says. The bus is moving. They’re cold and scared and he drank so much on Christmas Eve, he had to go to hospital. “I-I’m so sorry, I—You kissed me and it tasted nice.”

“It tasted nice,” Dan echoes, mumbles out a repeat. Over and over and over. He’d rather be fucking dead. “You hurt that man but it tasted nice. I don’t want to want you, Phil. I don’t want to write you anymore.”

“You don’t have to write me anymore,” he’s slurring, and Dan doesn’t know how he hasn’t passed out. Dan doesn’t know how France seems so beautiful from the hazy view of the window, blurry and distinct and near and far. Alcohol is all sloshy in Phil’s voice, like ambulance tyres over December roads and Dan hopes they fucking crash. “I don’t want you to write m-me anymore either. I’m boring, I’m silly. I don’t want to be here no more, I don’t want to be here with you. I’m ready to go home now.”

“Home,” Dan’s voice aches. The word is tinged with everything he’s told it to be. “We don’t know where that is, Phil. I don’t and you don’t. We’ve forgotten whether we’ve forgotten or we just never we knew.”

Phil’s eyes are on the window. There’s a pre-morning mist over the glass and it’s more intriguing to his washed-out eyes than the moving scenery. “Are we going to Arles?”

“I don’t know, Phil, I don’t know,” Dan shakes his head. His knee starts shaking and the bus is littered with eleven-year-olds. First year, second year. One and one and one is three. “I want to go to Arles, I want to find the yellow house. Do you know the yellow house?”

“Van Gogh,” Phil says. He’s sick and he’s tired. “Van Gogh’s yellow h-house. His happy place, his painting place. Sunflowers and life and artwork and creation.”

“Yeah, Phil,” Dan nods to him. “Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. Can you tell me about the ark now?”

“The ark.”

“Please, Phil—Oh, please, tell me about the ark,” Dan’s voice gnaws on a plead and he wraps his thin fingers around the man’s arm. “Noah’s Ark, I want you to tell me about Noah’s Ark. The animals and the water and—”

“I can taste you when I cough,” Phil slurs. “You taste like you. Like lemon drops and sunflower seeds and t-those sugary drinks my mom used to buy me from the—from—from the corner shop. You taste like smoking b-behind bike sheds and lighting cigarettes under school desks and—and you taste like rain, taste like coffee. Y-You’re shaking fingers on piano keys, baby, you’re purple bruising on sick-white knees and you’re in love with me, i-intertwined with me. You hate yourself and you can—you can feel it in the way you kiss. You can feel it against your lips and around the slight edges of y-your mouth and—and you taste like shower water and feel l-like tight muscles and I don’t like you, I don’t love you—”

“You can kiss me again, Phil,” Dan says. He’s still clinging to his arm and the world doesn’t know the difference between them. “I want you to kiss me, I want you to—Please, can you kiss me? Please, Phil, please can you just—You just kiss me with your hands, look for a pulse and tell me a story and put your thumb in the dip in my lip and your fingers up the front of my shirt.”

Phil’s got ocean eyes of disregard and ignorance when he shakes his head. He breathes through cracked lips so hard, it’s a whistle and Dan’s nauseous in a waiting room again. Alcohol up his nostrils, his husband’s sweat-riddled skin that reeks of the shit because he tried to drown himself but only ended up with a poisoned liver. And it doesn’t fucking matter anymore, but Dan would have died for him in the hospital bed and died for him on the stretcher like he’d die for him in the hotel room and die for him on the bus.

He’s a man in space pyjamas and Paris before morning when he looks down at their thighs pressed together and whispers, “Where do I end and you begin?”

Phil shakes his head.

People never notice anything.

He’d hate blizzard-women and he’d hate little lions cubs and he reaches into a bag at his feet with no coordination and incoherency to retrieve a shitty hat. A cap, a red one that ends just above his ears and comes down over his forehead to shield his brow from any light.

“It’s for you,” Phil tells him. “You s-should put it on. I want you to, I want you to. Do it because I w-want you to.”

And Dan couldn’t give a fuck about anything but Phil’s arm and Phil’s sleeve and Phil’s voice and Phil’s command. Soft, hesitant. He’s so beautiful and so dangerous and so reckless and so simple. He’s arches in spines and soft skin over pointed bones and busy stomachs of busy towns, messy thoughts of messy heads. He makes no sense and there are no walls to paint and he wishes he’d never got on the fucking bus when he tucks the cap-thing down over his ears and his hair traps itself under the fabric.

Space pyjamas and red hats.

Tears over the knees of Phil’s jeans and scuffs on the sides of his trainers and _no Paris, no Paris, we can’t go to Paris._ But Dan’s Paris has driven Phil to lose his fucking mind and Dan’s Paris has driven Louis to leave the memories of his mother behind. It’s driven Hélène to concrete curbs and conversations of creation and driven a man to a fight in a hallway, a child to a question of faith. It’s bad and it’s good, until death it is all life and Dan’s love for his husband is careful footsteps over creaking stairs and bruised knuckles over pale walls. It’s a hat on backwards, a restless skeleton and a chord of a distant memory. The pages still folded in novels even after they’re completed, the old clothes on the washing line and the place out in the rain on the tarmac. The tattoos only half completed and the blood spat into white sinks to convince yourself you can wash away the pain.

Dan says, “I forget where we were.”

And Phil says, “We weren’t anywhere. Continue where you want to.”

And he is so sad and he is so drunk.

Dan is so sad and so happy.

“I’d rather be dead,” he tells Phil, and Phil’s breath is quick and disorganised.

“I would, too,” he slurs. “Want some more vodka. Can we get off and look for a bar? Dan. Can we look for a bar?”

“No, Phil, no bar,” Dan shakes his head. He’s still clinging to his arm. “You’re too sick to go to a bar. You’re too sick and you need to go to sleep and—Are you tired, Phil? Are you tired?”

“I want to _drink_ —”

“Phil,” Louis reaches forward and puts his hands on Phil’s shoulders. “Stop now, come on. You can’t be out making—”

“He just needs to sleep, Lou,” Dan insists, pushing his palms out over Phil’s stomach and then around his back. He’s glued to the shape of his frame, glued to his body. And if somebody looked at them, they’d think that Phil was wearing Dan. They’d think he was his shirt or think he was his jacket and he isn’t, they’re not poets so fucking stupid, but he’s stuck to him. Like fabric would be if he stumbled over his feet into a pool and then clambered out of the side.

Dan runs his fingers down over the knots in the man’s back and he’s there staring through eyes sadder than the woman in the waiting room. Phil shifts, starts muttering, and then buries his face into Dan’s shoulder like he’s young and he’s stupid and he’s miserable about parents or education or friends. He’s miserable about a boy who tries too hard to love him and Dan is one thing and its opposite and then whatever’s between them but he can’t fucking find the hate for his husband like he can the love. He goes through his rib cage with a flashlight, searching up over the bones and around the sides and down the front like his ribs are trees and he’s searching the forest for a missing person. Flyers on trunks, flyers on building walls. He’s got tired eyes with purple markings and he's asking around the city, but nobody’s fucking seen his hate. It’s been a while, they say. It's long gone now.

And the temples of Dan’s head are pulsing and stuttering, as if his brain is pushing up against the insides of his skull when Phil drags his nose down into that place underneath his shoulder where his chest begins. His fingers run along the edges of Dan’s pyjama shirt and he whimpers, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Phil,” Dan whispers to him, and pushes his hand through the man’s hair. Eighteen, eighteen, everything is okay when it isn’t. Violence up the wall, blood all over the carpet. The kids trying to sleep and the sunset through the glass pane, pouring over Louis’ mother so orange and so empty. Her hair resting over the creases creased into the pillow and the bedsheets caught between her ankles, the depression caught between the lines on her forehead. Visible when she lifts her shirt, visible when she goes to shower. She can’t look at herself in the mirror because she's got too much and too little and she'd rather be fucking dead, she’d rather be fucking anything else, because people are cruel and people are vile and people never notice anything.

“No,” Phil is crying. “It isn’t, i-it isn’t. I hurt you, I—I’m so sorry, I never w-wanted to hurt you, Dan, I—Please, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Phil, it’s okay,” Dan moves his fingers through the man’s hair, black and messy and tangled with traces of a woman he touched only to forget he still wanted to touch somebody he forgot how to. And their memories come quick, their memories come ugly. Their memories are leaving the hot water on for too long and testing it with the first finger and their memories are waking early, their memories are sex when they're drowsy and distant. Bottom lips over earlobes, teeth over skin and hands over hip bones and _I love you, I need you, I want you._

Phil holds his arms around Dan’s body and cries soft whimpers into his pyjamas.

Dan says, “Phil, I—Don’t cry, please. Please, you don’t have to cry. I’ll tell you a story, Phil, I’ll tell you a story.”

And Phil is drunk and Phil is shaking when Dan wraps him up with thin limbs and sticky-out elbows and whispers, “There’s this girl, Phil, this really pretty girl. She’s got a small dog and she lives with her aunt and uncle on some farm in some place. She’s happy, she’s real happy, but one day there’s this storm—this cyclone—and it carries her house into a magical land. In the magical land, there are good witches and bad witches and these little munchkins who live everywhere, talking in these funny voices and saying all these funny things. A good witch comes to meet the girl and gives her these shoes that are so beautiful and so divine and used to belong to a wicked witch before she died. This good witch is kind and helpful and tells the girl she must travel with her dog through the land to find the wizard. The great and powerful wizard. So she sets off down the yellow brick road and she meets a scarecrow, who she has to free. Then she meets a Tinman who needs her to give him oil and a cowardly lion, too. These people, Phil, they all want things. And so the girl tells them that they have to come with her to meet the wizard and ask him for his help.

They travel for a while and when they get to the magical city, they go and find the wizard. But when they see him, they all see different things. Terrible beasts and balls of fire and ladies and giant heads. The wizard tells them that they have to kill the wicked witch, the Wicked Witch of the West who’s cruel and powerful. This witch sees them all coming and she sends animals and insects and soldiers to attack them but nothing works until she sends these monkeys to capture them. And she makes the girl her slave, she pushes the girl too far. The girl is sad and angry and she throws a bucket over the wicked witch and the witch starts to melt. She dies, Phil, and then everything is free. Everyone is free. They go back to the great wizard, only to find that he's just a simple old man who isn’t too special and isn’t too great but he gives them all the things they ask for, in his own little way. And he takes the girl and her dog home, or something like that, and all is good and all is well. She’s happy, Phil, she’s home. It’s a pretty story, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Phil whimpers, and he's still crying but it’s much softer and it’s matted with vodka and matted with peace. It’s there in the still air of the jittering bus, there in the silence and there in the heaven. “A pretty story. A pretty story, baby, so pretty. I-I’m sorry, I—Dan, I don’t know. I want to go to sleep.”

“You can, Phil,” Dan tells him. “You can sleep now, you can sleep. It’s okay. We don’t have to be okay.”

And Phil’s got his hands around him still, got his head against his chest. He lifts himself up all lazy and incoherent and puts his mouth to the side of Dan’s jaw like he’s mad and he’s stupid. And he is, Dan thinks, but Dan doesn’t want to waste anymore words in telling him to stop. He says his name and Phil shakes his head, brushing his lips across the side of his face and up to his ear.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he’s saying. Slurring and speaking. “Love you, I’m so sorry.”

And Dan pushes his shoulders back, pushes him down onto his lap. The man rests his head there on his knees like he never often used to and closes his eyes with an open mouth, closes his eyes with clenched and frightened fists. And there are no dilated pupils, no grinding jaws. Dan thinks of white but it’s the snow on Christmas Eve, it’s the way blood is purple more than it’s ever been red when mixed with sludges and frost. It’s cold and it’s terrifying, it’s _fuck you_ and it’s _love you_ and it’s _help me, get off me, get out from under my skin._ So Dan thinks about Phil climbing out from his bloodstream with a shirt wet and stuck to his chest and pulling veins from where they’re wrapped tight around his wrists and his ankles and his legs like seaweed, or some shit.

He finds sunlight and sits under it and thinks about gentle breezes and thinks about Van Gogh and thinks about pretty things, thinks about simple things. Locks on shed doors and mugs stacked in dishwater and cereal with warm milk, running backwards up a street and _Dan, Dan, you’re too slow, you’re too fucking slow._

Laughter through the rushes of wind around ears, stumbling heels and shaking cameras and the edge of a pier, the shape of a cityscape. Videos and recollections and car radios and crackling vinyls. Dan Howell and Phil Lester, the friends and the lovers and the windows down in cars, the fines for the speeding tickets and the _worth it_ ’s and the _fuck it_ ’s and how wanting to be a writer is better than actually being one. Before the cash and the liquor stores, the mattress without bedsheets and the walls without paper. Dan’s a nihilist nostalgic for the near-death experiences, the coalescent adolescents with the adjacent antidepressants and the closed medicine cabinets in the cluttered fucking kitchen.

Dan thinks Phil is sleeping there on his lap, but he isn’t sure. He’s got letters on his wrist that he doesn’t remember how to pronounce and he thinks he’d rather be dead than try anyway.

His hat looks funny on his head.

: :

They ride through the city for a long time. Dan counts the seconds over and over but loses his bearings one too many times and Hélène tries to talk to him, Louis tries to make him laugh. But it’s forced and it’s not funny and he doesn’t know how to tell them he just wants to drown in the rain that began somewhere deep into the first hour of the ride. It’s cold and it’s grey, this fine rain from these compact clouds that drain themselves over France.

Dan would rather lay there in the nothing, in the puddles ringed with colour, than sit with his husband sleeping on his lap. The man makes his skin prickle and he fucking hates his guts.

But people never notice anything.

“We should get off here,” Louis says. There are two teenage boys at the back of the bus that have been there since the last couple of stops and nobody can shut them up. Nobody’s fucking tried, but they piss everyone off. Dan wishes he knew how to use his fists like his husband does, like his husband can't stop doing. “It’s been long enough, we have to find something to eat.”

“Is it too early for breakfast in the cafés?” Hélène asks.

“Probably,” Louis answers, and there’s a sigh sleeping under his voice. “We’ll have to find a hotel to check in to, see if we can ask around for shit in the area.”

“It’s raining, Louis,” Dan turns to tell the man. He hasn't seen him for a while and he’s more orange than he’s ever been in the grey city. Grey and sad and melancholic. Like somebody’s written it down on a sheet of paper and ran it through water, let the colours and the inks run free off the edges. Dan doesn’t understand it and he doesn’t care to explain it and he wouldn’t like it, even if he did.

Homesick, homesick, homesick.

“It’s pretty heavy,” Hélène says. Her eyes are past the glass and Dan wonders if she knows people don't see the window, they see what’s behind it. “We should find some shelter somewhere, wait out the storm. I don’t fancy dragging Phil through the rain. He’ll be massively hungover, and everything else.”

“Yeah,” Louis breathes. “Yeah, okay. We’ll find a ledge to stand under or something, some place to keep us dry. This place looks nice enough though, we should get off. Dan, buddy, can you wake Phil up? Give him a nudge, yeah?”

And so Dan pushes his fingers into the flesh over Phil’s shoulder and prods him. Then he wraps his weak hand around him and shakes the bones under his skin, tries not to think about his stomach or his neck or his chest. He tries not to think about the single bed or the needles on the carpet or the lines between the bathroom tiles that look like trenches dug-out when you’re close enough. Like little rows of sand, like there are soldiers standing in the mud and the gunfire, all sweat and blood and tears. Physical exertion, mental ambushes. Trauma running through brains, coded into minds and infecting the systems.

Dan doesn’t want to go to war again.

He looks away from Phil when he wakes up.

“We gotta go, Phil, come on,” Louis stands up when the bus slows to a halt. He grips onto the railing to steady himself and then hooks his hands under the man’s arms, forces his weight from the seat.

“No, I—Fuck, don’t, fuck off me,” Phil grumbles, running his knuckles over his eyes. There’s a mark on his face from the friction with Dan’s pyjama bottoms and he’s unsteady, unstable. He doesn’t remember that he cried and he doesn’t remember that he yelled and he doesn’t remember the man he hurt, doesn't remember the taste of Dan’s mouth. He doesn’t remember that he tried to describe it like he doesn’t remember he had too much on Christmas Eve. “What—Where are we? Fuck, I don’t—”

“Remember,” Louis says. “It’s fine, you’re not supposed to. I didn’t expect you to. You drank a hell of a lot and you’re probably still pretty fucking drunk so just don’t ask questions and do what I say.”

“No,” Phil pushes on the man's chest and sits back down. Dan’s standing at his side. Red, red, red. “No, fuck you, I don’t have to do anything you say.”

“Then we’ll leave you here, Phil, how about that? We’ll leave you on this bus so you can sleep some more and wake up in the middle of fucking nowhere, how does that sound?”

“Just get up, Phil, get up,” Dan starts whining. He reaches for the man but he thrashes him away and gets up to take one step forward and two steps back.

They think they’re fucking poets, or some shit.

They think they’re fucking writers.

And Dan Howell wishes he could talk to God without having to say a prayer because he doesn’t know where to start and he doesn't know how to end. He doesn’t know the in-between bits, doesn’t know the pleas he’s got to utter to get the guy’s fucking attention. But if they spoke, they’d hate each other. Because Dan put a rock through a church window when he was eleven years-old and Dan used his pen to write _Jesus doesn’t love you_ along the bathroom walls of his Sunday school and Dan would put through nails through his wrists if the piece of shit had gifted him the hands to do it to both. They’d hate each other because Dan is a masochist, Dan is an atheist and Dan is a cannibal. God wasn’t there when he needed to be told that cutting his wrists wouldn’t cut his ties to his father and wouldn’t make him forget that his husband would rather touch the neck of a bottle than touch his skin.

Phil doesn’t say anything as he stumbles down the bus. Louis follows him and Dan shuffles himself into Hélène’s side, takes a bag from her and slings it onto his back.

The rain is cold.

The city is sad.

Dan doesn’t have a jacket and doesn’t have a heart because it’s still there bleeding on the bedsheets in the stupid fucking hotel room. He’s got his hat on backwards and it’s red and it’s silly and his feet look funny in the trainers and the puddles. Paris is still sleeping, its streets still lonely. And it makes Dan think about kids in their bedrooms with their fingers around their curtains and their wardrobes open for their jackets. Fringes damp down over foreheads, socks wet in shoes.

There’s an apartment block and a closed café with a slanted roof over its entrance. The sun is so distant, Dan thinks, so far from its home in the corner of his eye. They rush down the street under the rain and God’s anger and settle beneath the cover, bunched up together.

There’s a line of rainwater sneaking down the centre of Dan’s back and it runs over his hips, soaks into his skin. He shivers and watches Louis run his hands through his heavy hair.

“Bloody weather,” he curses. “What does that sign say on the window?”

Hélène is rubbing her hand over the rain on her face when she peeks behind her to look at the café’s glass. “It opens at seven on weekdays,” she says. Weekdays. “Just under an hour, fuck.”

“I want to go home,” Phil speaks. “I want to go home, let me go home. Fuck you, I want to go home.”

He’s talking to himself.

Too sad to be angry and too tired to be sad.

“Hey!” There’s a voice in the distance somewhere, Dan hears, from a little way up the street. It’s a girl and she’s drowning and she’s wearing thin clothes. Tight and short. She’s walking towards them with her phone in her hand and her life in the other and Dan wonders which one she fucking values more. “Hey, can you guys give me a ride?”

“Oh, no, sorry,” Louis apologises. His voice is loud as she approaches, over the rush of the rain. “We can’t, we just—we just got the bus here.”

“The bus?” The girl is deflated. “The bus was just here?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Fuck, of course it was,” she spits to herself. Her eyes are red and her smile has melted away and Dan’s thinking of the witch in his story with the bucket of water over her head. He looks down and sees a brick road under his feet. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “Any of ’ya got a phone, then? I gotta call my friend, I gotta.”

“What’s up with yours?”

The girl shakes her head. She’s been crying. “Smashed it on the fuckin’ concrete back there. Right in a puddle, screen down, and some ass sped up his cardboard box on wheels to splash me. _Look_ , have any of ‘ya got a _phone_?”

Louis glances over Dan’s head to Hélène and says, “I think mine’s in your bag. Have you got yours on you?”

“Yeah, I—” Hélène rummages through her jacket pockets and retrieves her phone. She hands it across. “There you go, there should be a bit of charge. Enough for a call.”

“God, thanks, girl,” she breathes and Dan watches her, stares at her, as she taps on the screen and dials a number and waits with the phone against her ear. She balances it between her head and her shoulder as she wraps her hands around her hair and rings the water out.

She’s awfully pretty, Dan thinks. Awfully pretty. There’s a succession of shivers in the structure of her frame, ushered continually by the wind against her skin in the tight clothes. It’s a dress, or it’s supposed to be, cutting too far up her thigh and too low down her chest. The skin below that place where her neck ends is cream and tender, soft and vulnerable. Her arms are thin and her eyes are sad, only not waiting-room-woman sad. Not man-in-the-car sad. Her eyes are the kind-of sad Dan needs some time to think about before he gives her the skill of his ink, before he writes her her own passage. 

“Yeah, well, just do it,” she’s saying down the phone. “Jesus, ’ya gotta make a game of everything? I told you, the café. What? What did—Oh, yeah, opposite the bus stop. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Just hurry up.”

And then she hangs up and reaches to pass the phone back to Hélène, muttering, “Thanks, sorry about that. Is it cool if I wait here with ’ya, until my friend gets here?”

“Yeah,” Dan says to the girl. “Yeah, lady, of course.”

She smiles at him, and shuffles to stand under the protection of the roof and the brickwork. She’s got her arms hugged around her tiny waist and she keeps grinding her teeth and Dan wonders how long it’s been she took speed.

Over and over and over.

“Hey,” she says, and nods to Dan. “Where’d ’ya get them pyjamas?”

Dan looks down to his chest. The galaxies are bigger on his shoulders and his skeleton won’t settle. “I don’t know,” he whispers to her.

“Well, they’re cute. I like ’em. I used to have a pair when I was a kid. Space pyjamas. Are ’ya waiting for the café to open?”

“Yeah,” Louis nods. “But it’s a while, I don’t think we can. It’s cold out.”

“Damn straight,” The girl say and starts ringing out her hair again. Dan’s mind plucks metaphors from the bones in her fingers. “Who’re you guys? You’re out pretty early, didn’t expect to see anyone around. You visiting?”

“Yeah, something like that. It’s complicated.”

“Ain’t it always?” she smiles. “But, look, if you’re lookin’ for things to do, I can for sure help ’ya out.”

“Things to do?”

“Best cafés, best bars. There’s a cheap hotel on the corner not far from the theatre.”

“Theatre?” Hélène echoes. Dan’s attention is strong around the word, fiddling and toying with it.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s a couple blocks away. If ’ya get a cab, it’ll take you straight there. Weather ain’t really fit for walking places.”

“We could do that,” Louis mumbles. “Yeah, we will. Thanks.”

“No problem,” she pauses a moment to watch a car pass down the street. “Any of ’ya got a lighter? I’m dyin’ for a smoke, after the night I’ve had.”

“We got bags full of stuff,” Hélène says. “It’d be hard to find shit.”

The girls sighs and nods her head. “Yeah, yeah, it’s fine.”

“What happened?” Dan asks her. He doesn’t know why he fucking does. “What happened to you, lady, why was your night not good?”

“Oh,” she breathes a laugh, and it’s tinged with such sadness that Dan’s sort-of knocked off his feet. “Just—Just bad things. Bad things happened. Shit don’t always work out the way it’s supposed to, ’ya know? Motherfuckers take their cash with them, take advantage of my services. Some dirty fucker touched me and left me out in the rain.”

“Fuck,” Louis curses, under his breath. He starts taking his jacket off. “Hey, listen, take this—”

“No, no, it’s fine. Really,” she insists, with gentle hands pushing the clothing away. The rough woman with the gentle hands. “Thanks, that’s fucking kind of ’ya and all but you should keep it. Keep your stuff. I need a cigarette more than I’ll never need pity.”

Louis shrugs. “It’s just a jacket. You can have it, it’s not that big of a deal.”

“It is. Keep your stuff,” The girl distances herself for a moment, drums her foot against the step of the café. Then she leans forward and gestures to Phil. “He don’t talk much, does he?”

“That’s Phil,” Dan tells her. A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times. “He’s sad, lady, he’s real sad. Drunk and sad. He’s my husband.”

She arches her brow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s nice, ain’t it? I don’t think marriage is for me.”

Hélène laughs. “Me neither.”

And Dan thinks about their wedding and thinks about the white. And thinks about how they’re stood on the step of some shitty café on some shitty day in some shitty month in some shitty year. So much of one thing and not enough of another and Dan would rather be dead than see another fucking human being.

Because he doesn’t give a fuck.

He’s so many miles past giving a fuck that he’s turned back and he can’t even see the indication that he ever fucking did.

“Your hat’s real nice,” The girl tells him. “’Ya look like someone, sound like someone. I don’t know. You know?”

“No,” Dan shakes his head. He’s buttons of irritability on a jacket of depression. People never notice anything and this girl and her friend and that woman and that man are all just the same, all so fucking simple. They’re not what he wants them to be and not what he writes them to be and he’s the next fucking Hemingway, or some shit, the next fucking Van Gogh.

But he doesn’t give a fuck what they say.

He’s sad and annoyed and sick and tired and he’ll bleed when they leave him alone.

Sooner or later, this girl’s friend arrives. She’s got hair cut short, black and blue and she’s tall and she’s pretty. She says, “I was sleeping. I’ve told you, I’m not gonna keep doing this.”

“And ’ya won’t bloody have to,” The girl scoffs. She steps out into the rain and smiles at the four. One and one and one is— “Thanks, it’s been nice. You should hit that theatre up, it’s a damn good place. I wish ’ya the best, in everything and whatever.”

And they say something, but Dan doesn’t.

He smiles though, and watches her go.

She says, “You’re too fucking grumpy in a morning, Olivie,” to her friend.

And her friend says, “Shut the fuck up. You’re lucky I got out of bed for you.”

“God, stop being so _aggressive_ —”

And then Dan hears nothing else.

They’re in the car or the rain is too loud or his head is fucking up.

He thinks maybe he’s crying and he pushes himself into Hélène’s side, under the rain and the poetry and the ocean in the sky.

“You alright?” she asks him.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

Dan shakes his head and she hugs her arm around his hips and they stand there with nothing and everything on their shoulders.

Phil Lester got drunk on Christmas Eve.

He has eyes that say he used to think he’d grow up to be an actor in a movie of people who don’t give a fuck and eyes that say he’s got a list of men he never wants to see again.

Dan would rather be dead than look at him, and he pulls his ring off his finger and drops it into a puddle.

People never notice anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyy, sorry I’ve been gone a while. School has been hectic and shit. I like this chapter a lot, there’s so much I’ll have to say about it. The story’s coming to an end slowly and, yes, you are still supposed to not understand anything. Let me know what you thought, I hope you enjoyed x


	17. Monkey

**number seventeen: monkey**

_It_ isn’t long before they step back out into the rain from under the shelter and wander down the dingy street. Early morning, nearing on seven. Dan doesn’t recognise the voice in his head but if he spoke, he wouldn’t either. He can’t understand the lines printed across the palms of his hands and the little bumps of his knuckles. He’d rather be fucking dead than keep writing because it makes him feel like shit and he wants to do nothing but let the wet concrete find his knees and soak his pyjamas.

Phil Lester is there somewhere, in the scene and in his chest. He’s there in his wrist and there in his stomach and there in the water that runs over rooftops and shuffles over brickwork. He’s the grey sky before it realises it’s grey and bends around the city, droops with weights of emotion, and pours over Paris.

He’s the sentence that doesn’t make sense.

The solution that doesn’t apply to the situation.

He’s a thousand things and Dan’s tired of beginning with _he’s_ , like _he’s dumb_ and _he’s ridiculous_ and _he’s that writer_ and _he’s that breath I took before I remembered I had to breathe._

A city without a skyline and a street without a corner.

They get into a cab at some point and Louis sits up front. The backseat is cramped and uncomfortable and the driver’s this guy Dan doesn’t give enough of a fuck to talk about. He’s old, or something, with grey hairs between the black ones like sunshine between the blinds. He’s a lonely shot of vodka and a lifetime of milky mornings, white skies and streetlights and _I’ve threatened suicide enough times for you to ignore me when I tell you I want to die._

“The theatre?” Louis says. “Not far from here, near some hotel?”

And when the driver speaks, it’s this sort-of grunt. It doesn’t sound at all coherent and Dan doesn’t think he deserves Louis’ time, for he’s angry and he’s irritable and he doesn’t have a fucking clue what colour his aliens are but if they had to be something, they’d be red.

Red, red, red.

Like the colour of the collar threaded around his school jumper. And the colour of his old History book, before his mother threw it out. And the colour of French soldiers and the colour of bloody noses and the colour up the wall in the hotel Louis’ mother died. Red for Dan’s parents, red for the bathroom sink. He doesn’t think he has to reiterate his feelings anymore but he’s got a novel built on the fact that he tried and so he puts his fingers to the sides of his head and works the last words out of there like his husband works the last drops of vodka from the bottle. They’re geniuses, they’re addicts. Skilled in the art of not giving a fuck in the same breath as _I care too much_ and folded corners of draft-six pages, empty syringes and broken hinges and a rhyme scheme so nauseating, Dan wouldn’t need his fingers to vomit it up.

Because they’re a polished surface and some artificial flowers. And they’re nurses with blood down the front of their uniform and children in wards with parents and ice-cream and _strawberry, meds, strawberry, meds._ Chocolate cones, sugary sprinkles. Vanilla and toffee and bleach over a windowsill, detergent over bedsheets. Up over noses, tickling inside nostrils. They’re TVs loose on walls and a skirting cleansed and white and machines that buzz and beep through the indifference of pre-morning hours. Hospital gowns bigger around the thighs, zipped low down the spine and restraints around skinny wrists. Clinics and institutions and heart monitors during visiting hours, tiny fingers in maternity wards. Shoulders slumped against vending machines and self-admitted patients and ambulances on Christmas Eve, surgeons with scissors to snip at sickness. Postcards sent and never returned, salvia smeared across sticky sides of envelopes and _yours sincerely, fuck you for leaving me on my own._

There’s rain on the windows and sloshes of water in the road and Dan searches for salvation in the silent situation but it’s sore and it stings and he’d rather be dead than pretend he believes in God.

Because he’s a nihilistic narrator.

A generic fucking bastard.

The driver says, “You people are out bloody early. What’s the deal, ’ya on the run?”

“We’re just looking for a hotel,” Louis dismisses, with an excuse that bleeds like a thousand tiny paper cuts. Dan’s heart is angry, fingers clenched, and he starts shaking his head. They should be looking for a fucking hospital, he thinks. To be stripped down from his space pyjamas, torn away from his pen and paper. The taste of white pills on a red tongue and the taste of lukewarm water on a scratched throat. “Been travelling a lot. We need a place to rest, catch up on some sleep.”

“Yeah, yeah,” The driver says. He’s got a thick accent and a voice clogged with smoke and Dan scratches his bitten nails down his wrist at the thought of a cigarette. He thinks of carving the words _help me_ over his veins, as if his skin is sand and he’s alone on an island. But the tide is too wild, the ocean is too sad, and it comes like sleeves to conceal and wash away and the world just keeps fucking spinning, regardless of the pace. Regardless of who needs help and regardless of who’d like it.

“Do you happen to know what’s on at the theatre right about now?” Louis asks. Conversation forced into the empty spaces, ushered into the death.

“What’s on?” The driver remarks. “Do I look like the bloody man to attend the bloody theatre? _Theatre_ , bloody hell. I ain’t been to no theatre since I was a stripling.”

_Stripling._

Fucking hell.

Dan breathes a laugh at it, but it’s cold and choleric. Hélène puts her hand on his knee and she’s watching with concerned eyes and everything stands crooked, everything falls stilted. He should never have fucking done it, he realises. He should never have fucking wrote her and never have fucking wrote Louis and never have fucking wrote them into a marriage with no middle between the beginning and the end. Jesus didn’t die for purple bruises on sinful knees, for jaws clenched and stomachs empty and chests clutched. For dust over pews, stains over glass, creed between pages and the gospel to closed ears.

Louis says, “Well, do you know if the plays are ever any good?”

And the driver says, “Look, sir, I don’t _know_ about the theatre. And frankly, I ain’t ever gonna give a monkey’s. I imagine the plays are satisfactory.” 

“Why would you imagine that?” Hélène asks him.

“’Cause they all bloody are. Plays, productions—theatre is just a load of nonsense, if you ask me.”

“Don’t think anybody did,” she mumbles, under her breath. “Dick.”

And Dan is still shaking his head. He doesn’t know why, like he doesn’t know anything. Words or vocabulary or language or synonyms. Contextual references, allusions and influence and red hats turned backwards, bus rides to fucking nowhere.

People never notice anything.

There’s a lake skirting the streets that won’t leave them alone.

“Mister,” Dan speaks. His temper is compressed by intrigue and a language device. “You see that lake over there?”

The driver glances in the mirror at him, face smoothed with a frown. “What, boy?”

“Over there,” Dan jams his finger against the foggy glass of the window. “In winter, mister, in winter. Where do the ducks go when the lake freezes over?”

“Ducks? Bloody _ducks_?” he laughs, like he can’t quite believe the question. He doesn’t understand. “What ’ya talking about ducks for, you moron?”

“Where do they _go_ , mister?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know where the ducks go? They stay right where they bloody well are.”

“They don’t,” Dan says. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “They don’t, they can’t. It’s cold, mister, it’s frosted. They can’t swim in it, where do they go?”

“I don’t _know_ , boy,” he grumbles. “Why don’t you go ask ’em, if you’re that interested?”

“I will,” Dan says. His skin is prickling again, irritation coming like needles under the surface. He kicks his feet against the chair before him and turns to yank at the door’s handle and his mother is there with child-locks, there with her eyes in the rear-view mirror and her knuckles white around the wheel. And Dan has been crazy long before she kicked her heels into his locked bedroom door and emptied their house of pills and lengthy cords. Long before his father fucked off into the motherfucking sunset to motherfucking find himself. Long before _a boy needs a father to keep him grounded_ and _you’ll never survive on your own._ And Dan has been crazy long before they named him a piece of shit and long before he stuck two fingers down his throat and long before he tasted lines of coke and dilated pupils and—

“What the hell ’ya doing?” The driver spits at him. “I’m bloody drivin’, you can’t just open the goddamn door. Use your head, for Christ’s sake.”

Dan yanks at the door again. Darkness blanching through empty blue eyes, pens sketching patterns on wrists and fingers tugging at the edges of elastic. Men with unhinged drawers on sickly-white dressers, curtains taped back and bathroom lights burning. Dan’s organs don’t fit in his chest. Dan’s skeleton won’t sleep under his skin. Dan’s mother won’t leave him alone and Dan’s father won’t come back home and there’s poetry in his sickness like there’s sickness in his poetry. Yellow and green and grey and red, straitjackets and morpheme-addicts and sex on the kitchen floor, blood up the hallway wall and _use your head, Dan, use your fucking head._

He kicks his foot against the door and doesn’t feel a fucking thing. He used to say shit when he was a kid because he knew people would say shit back and he thought the world would stop spinning to give the attention he desired. But now he holds onto his sanity like he’d hold onto water in the palm of his hand and he’s writing for nothing, writing for nobody, writing for teeth dug into the skin of his arm. His ring is in a pool of dirty rainwater and his zero and his nine have faded like the milk in the sky, like the innocence of his school friends and his high-school girlfriend and they took mouth-corner kisses and matched it with sex. They took rye fields and open minds, took assembly hymns and loose-novel pages and stuck them to the walls of psychiatric hospitals as if a bible verse could ever sound the same as a medical diagnosis.

So _flush your pills before they teach you how to swallow_ , fingernails scratching over eyelids and keyboards clicking the letters of _lunatic_ and galaxies that are bigger on your shoulders because _it’s poetry, you idiot, it’s just fucking poetry._

Flitting sheets.

Desperate pens.

Dan kicks at the door and Louis is talking and Hélène is talking and the wheels are still moving, his chest is still thudding. Right between his ears, as if his heart is his brain and his brain is his heart and he doesn’t fucking need either but they won’t leave him alone. He can’t take them out without losing his blood and it’s like trying to remove his fingers without removing his ring.

He never understood literature and never understood language, hung low at the bottom of the class with letters deep into the alphabet strung up on his skin. The ducks go home when the lake freezes over and the walls bleed colour when the paper is stripped and the children fall harder when they think they can fly.

“Dan, please, come on,” Louis has turned and is reaching into the backseat to hold onto the man. Space pyjamas. Vincent Van Gogh. Psychotic and Socratic and hypnotically nihilistic. “Calm down, buddy, hey—Dan, hey—”

“Shut _up_ , Louis, just—” Dan thrashes the touch away and digs his nails into his palms. Red, red, red. The window is cold and the glass is foggy. There’s heating in the front seat of the cab and a nutcase writing paintings in the back.

He’s a replica of Western Art.

He’s a neurotic fucking mess.

He’s the words they said and the words they didn’t and he’s one more than the other but he’s damned if he knows which and damned if he even gives a shit because he doesn’t listen, he’s never listened, it’s his biggest fucking problem. Essays turned in six days too late, written in blue ink when it should have been black. A stain in the corner and a kick in the teeth and _my parents don’t like each other, please be nice to me._

The lake isn’t there behind the glass like the cameras aren’t there on Paris and Dan rubs his hands over his eyes, clenches his fingers in his hair and pulls at the strands. Strawberry shampoo, clumps in the tub and brushed over skin and bones pointed as shoulder-blades like fingers pointed as razors. Guns, bullets, French soldiers in the war. A love like a battlefield and some words like an army and a tally of casualties, a cuckoo concussion. Markers on best-selling novels, steady-rolls of drum beats.

Kisses soaked in red wine and a story constructed of recycled ideas. Loaded cannons, fired ammo. He trained his tongue to speak in bullets and his heart to beat for attention, for the knuckles on the door and the wind on the top floor when he rhymed _suicide_ with _that kid who died_ and told himself to fight it. Because he speaks like he’s been everywhere, speaks like he knows everything, when his heart wants nothing to but be left alone. So he talks in campaign speeches that broadcast out to deserted cities and entertain TV screens with inflicted-ignorance and a secular-solitude.

“’Ya off your head, lad,” The driver is speaking and Dan thinks they’ve stopped driving. The lake is gone. The world is sad. The pills are flushed and the theatre is big.

It’s outside, this grand building, occupying three quarters of the street. And Dan stares at the brickwork as he rushes out of the cab and stumbles over the concrete. He stares at it and thinks about it and his rage grows flustered with thoughts of its beauty. Adopted personas clinging to the skin of confident children, borrowed costumes loose around waistlines and stage lights over script-rhymes and showtimes inside skilled minds. Tickets bought and stuffed into pockets, corners curled and slipped under cuffs. All the world’s a stage, he thinks, and there’s art in the art of being an artist. Because the passage consists of theatre kids, of actors and actresses who choreographed their dances through logic-framed lessons to be defined by missed-cue critics and curtain-called creativity. 

“What was that about?” Louis says, when he’s out of the cab. Hélène has her hand on the flat of Phil’s shoulder and she’s studying the building like Dan studies the back of his hand.

He kicks at a stone when his fascination subsides and clenches his jaw. It’s still raining, drizzling down the sides of his face and he wipes his pyjama-sleeve over the water on his skin. Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. “What?”

“You _know_ what,” The word is forced in Louis’ voice but it’s a whisper and it’s concerned. He tries to touch him again and Dan moves so quick that his feet slip off the curb. “Dan, Jesus, you’re gonna—Get out of the road, come on—”

“I don’t _want_ to come on, Louis, I don’t—Fuck you, fuck all of you—” Dan starts pacing on the edge of the road and he fucking hopes the wind blows too fast or the rain falls too hard and nobody can see what they’re doing so nobody can blame anybody for the likelihood of his death. Because it would be nobody’s fucking fault, nobody’s but his own. Two steps into the road or two steps onto a track or a gun to the back of his throat or some pills on the surface of his tongue.

Suicidal and homicidal and Dan’s mad because he should’ve been restrained before he could fuck up anybody else. He’s mad because people don’t do their fucking job properly and they never fucking notice anything and they say the word _fuck_ too much and they don’t use their words to form poems enough. They don’t appreciate the colour in a monochrome situation and don’t realise that they can make anything out of nothing if they delete the first two letters and add a new three. If they articulate and verbalise and dramatise as if they’ve got guns to heads and blades to wrists and lips to unopened bottles of _whatever the fuck, I burn the most._ And when in doubt, they kick and scream, bring knuckles to plastered walls and shards of glass to pale throats and they curse on the fucking bible, they set fire to local churches and chant in verses of satanism and overused nihilism because nobody else gives a fuck.

Because it’s fucking stupid and fucking dumb.

Because it’s fucking _fine_ , Dan thinks. Everything is fucking _fine_.

God never liked us anyway.

“Hey, love, look,” Hélène is saying. Her hair is damp and stuck down to the back of her neck and Dan’s eyelashes are wet, vision cloudy. Phil Lester might be dead or might be alone or might be right there on the empty street, but as if it’s ever mattered. As if there’s a fucking difference. “It’s a flyer, for the plays. Productions. Come and see what they’re showing, come here.”

And Dan’s standing there shivering on the side of the road with too much to die for and not enough poetry to convince him to stay.

Not enough art, not enough effort.

He can’t hear music if he puts his fingers in his ears and he can’t read tales if he puts his hands over his eyes and he refuses to believe in a man who created shit so fucking basic.

A sentence that doesn’t make sense.

A solution that doesn’t apply to the situation.

Dan’s suddenly there next to Hélène and they’re looking at the words printed on the flyer. Running ink, stained white. Everything is grey but there’s colour on the sheet and Dan’s irritation can be manipulated by beauty as easy as language can be manipulated by his head.

All the world’s a stage.

“ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ ,” Phil speaks. He’s somewhere wandering for sanity in his mind but his insides know Shakespeare as much as Dan’s know Van Gogh and the words are his yellow paint, the plays are his yellow house. “Shakespeare, God, Dan—Shakespeare.”

Dan’s stomach turns at the sound of his name in the voice of his husband.

His fucking husband.

And his psychiatrist used to tell him his heart wanted to let go of what used to be and Dan told him the worst thing about the word _divorced_ is that he could make it rhyme with _before_ and it hurt like the sound of grinding teeth between “I want you” and “I need you” and—

“I’ve never been in love.”

“It’s showing tonight,” Hélène says, sort-of to Louis. There’s cash stored somewhere on him. “At eight.”

“We can afford to go,” Louis answers. “Everything else we have to pay for is pretty cheap. Food, a hotel. Only one room.”

“Are you sure? This place looks—” Hélène takes a breath and peers up at it. “I haven’t seen one like this before, not ever. It’s so big, so grand. All the hotshots play here, all the people who live and breathe acting. It’s bound to be expensive, Lou, and how can we even be sure there are tickets left?”

“We can’t,” he shakes his head. “But you want to go?”

“Of course I want to go,” she turns to look at the theatre again. “This place and Shakespeare and no responsibility in the world. Nothing but characters, a plot and some friends and a hotel in a dreary city. All we’d need is alcohol.”

“There’ll be bars around, maybe we could hit one up after the show.”

“Not with him,” Hélène nods to Phil. “Not with any of us, we’re supposed to be on the fucking run. And we can’t afford this, there’ll be no way.”

Louis shakes his head. “We’re going.”

“Louis—”

“We are,” he interrupts. She’s red and he’s orange and the sky should be stalling somewhere between white and blue, but it’s grey and it’s nothing and Dan can’t see the horizon for the too-slanted rooftops. He can’t see his story for the too-desperate sequences. He can’t see his husband for the too-lonely mornings. He can’t see tomorrow for the inconsistency of everyday and he can’t see the ending for the insanity worked before the time and he can’t read his writing if he puts his hands over his eyes.

Paris is vacant.

Paris is sleeping.

Phil Lester doesn’t believe in aliens because aliens don’t exist.

“We’ll come back down later when it’s all open and shit, check out the prices,” Louis is telling Hélène and pointing somewhere off scene, somewhere fucking irrelevant. Exhaustion sleeps in the blurs of frustration, concocts with loneliness and guilt and if Dan had a pair of scissors to cut through wires and open up his brain, he’d find dictionary definitions of the emotions glued to the insides of his skull. No fucking poetry, no fucking romanticism. Just words typed out, bleak and monotonous and so simple, too simple. Dan hates everything because people are too simple, people don’t fucking think. They hear exhaustion and see a man not being able to sleep but Dan sees first-time parents searching the night for a remedy nobody’s written down yet and he sees insomnia pulling at the threads of _I’ve got my life in order_. He sees teenagers slumped against bedroom walls, sees them backwards on mattresses with textbooks on their knees and equations behind their eyelids and he sees weekdays, sees tedium, sees repetition when the point’s already been made. The fingers on the faces of clocks in exam halls, the same answers to different questions, the gentle fear at three in the morning and the expectation of something more.

Dan hears loneliness and thinks of his husband with his father in a car on Christmas Eve. He thinks of hospital waiting rooms, he thinks of cluttered stages but empty audiences and he thinks of group-work in classrooms and crowds at concerts and family events, public weddings, solitude tugging at the edges of _company_ like _you have to know people to know you’re alone._

They’re walking down the street and there’s a hotel, maybe, or there fucking isn’t. It’s old and beaten-down, would look like Dan Howell if it were an excuse of a fucking person. And maybe he hates it because it’s him or maybe he hates it because its windows didn’t let the sunset streak in over Louis’ mother’s body. She didn’t sleep there, she didn’t die there. She didn’t cry there for her past or lay there with her pills and there isn’t blood smeared on the bedsheets, blood smeared up the wall. The place is fucking ugly and the room is fucking ugly and Dan stands there in the doorway with a groaning stomach and angry eyes and space pyjamas hanging loose on his shivering skin. 

Louis is kicking his shoes off and Hélène is shuffling bags over the carpet and Phil is doing nothing before a too-misty window. His outline is muddled, messy, like the corners of words when the side of a hand smudges over them. He’s still in his grey shirt with his jacket pulled tight over his frame and there’s no red under his nails anymore but there’s red in his silence, his distance.

There’s red in the slight movements of his eyes and the faint flexing of his jaw and Dan knows he didn’t mean it, he knows he’s mad and sad and drunk. But Dan’s head doesn’t give a fuck anymore, Dan’s head dismisses and disregards and it’s angry at Phil for fucking him up and ignoring his calls and drinking too much and touching the woman and having a child. He’s angry for the little bumps and angry for the tiny fingers and he’s angry for the fucking book, the touches in Manchester Station and the sex in the single bed and the drafts he shouldn’t have published, the words he shouldn’t have said. The pills and the coke and the bigger problems. The water over his thighs and the sugar on his tongue and the alcohol on December twenty-fourth with the poems and the purple and the promises.

Dan’s angry because _baby, we won’t make the mistakes they did_ and he’s angry because _I love you, don’t touch me, I love you._ All the saliva on the fingertips and the vodka down the shirts and the syringes in the blue veins and the prayers in the quiet. The Paris sky and the sleepless nights and the kitchen tiles and—

And Louis, he thinks, fuck Louis. He’s angry at Louis for treating him like a child and bleeding out orange and draining himself of his memories of his mother for a man who doesn’t deserve anything.

“Why are we here?” Dan says in the doorway. His voice is cold, like the metal of razors pushed to hot skin. Red, red, red. “I don’t want to be here, Louis, I don’t like it here. I don’t need here, I need help.”

Louis is taking his wet jacket off his shoulders when his expression stills and he breathes, “What?”

Phil’s silhouette turns in the corner of the room and dances with the low light from the ceiling. It’s some time near seven and the sky doesn’t know how to stop crying and nobody ever knows how to put shit right.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

“Help,” Dan repeats. Sad shit is good shit but no shit is better. “I need help.”

“You—” Louis blinks and the grey above the slanted city starts crashing. “You need help.”

“Take me to get help,” Dan turns to the door of the room and tries the handle. Stupid fucking doors that won’t motherfucking open. “A hospital, a fucking hospital. I need to go to a fucking hospital, why can’t you just—”

“No, Dan,” Phil starts talking. Over and over and over. “No, no hospital, no—”

“Dan,” Hélène tries to pry his fingers away from the door. “Hey, love, what’re you doing? Come on, come and sit over—”

“No, please,” Dan pushes the touches and voices away and drives his foot into the bottom half of the wood. The sound cracks through the stream of nothing and Dan’s eleven in his bedroom with his brother in his arms and the sheets over their heads and the music isn’t loud enough to drown the ocean of conflict some distance down the stairs. His parents as French soldiers and blood on his mother’s cheek, syrup on his father’s breath. Broken hinges and last-word-intentions and Dan doesn’t want to love people anymore because people never loved him.

So fuck his fucking husband.

Fuck his fucking friends.

Fuck his fucking parents and fuck the fucking children and—

“Dan, you need to calm down,” There’s a voice and some compassion but Dan is a self-admitted patient of impatience and temper and guilt and sin.

Acute mania with generalised delirium.

He goes over to the window and starts cracking his knuckles against the glass, spitting shit about parents and substance abuse and broken marriages.

“Paris is a fucking joke, this is all a fucking joke. Why the fuck is it raining?” he’s tearing at the thin curtains. “Why the fuck won’t it—Why doesn’t it ever stop _raining_?”

“ _Dan_ —”

“Fuck off,” he snaps and doesn’t turn around. Theo believes in God and his mother should teach him that the grass won’t be greener, that there isn’t an ‘other side’ and heaven is found in the slightest extensions of contentment on this side. The only fucking side. She should teach him that faith is nothing but a dramatic mutation of optimism and the pessimists are the atheists because Jesus’ wine glass was half fucking empty. He didn’t eat bread and if he did, it was stale. He wasn’t resurrected and if he was, nobody noticed. And the bible fucking lied but if it didn’t, it was fiction. Dan watches cars with broken headlights blur through the storm and he hears Phil say, “Stop it, Dan, you’re not going to hospital. You’re sad, baby, you’re just—I’m sorry, I—”

“Fuck you,” Dan growls, and starts walking over to him. One foot and then the other, one step forward and two steps back. One and one and one is three. “Fuck you, Phil, I fucking—I hate you, I hate you—”

“You don’t, shut up—” Phil shoves his chest and he stumbles back. “Shut up, Dan, don’t say that—”

“I wish I never fucking married you,” Dan moves back into his face and his fingers tingle like he’s going to draw them into a fist and connect it to the corner of his husband’s mouth. “Divorce me, you bastard, I _hate_ you—”

“Stop it, Dan,” Louis is there demanding rationality from the irrational situation and he forces Dan down onto the mattress, lowers himself to take off his shoes. He says, “You’re not going to fight anymore, you’re not going to say pointless shit. It doesn’t do anything, being angry doesn’t anything. Lay down and close your eyes and still your heart and sleep. And then when you wake up, you can eat and we can talk about what you want to do.”

“I want to go to _hospital_ , Louis, I need to go the hospital,” Dan tries to scramble off the sheets and stop thinking about the white floors but his fingers feel lovely when they tickle past his tongue and his stomach feels lovely when there’s nothing to vomit up. And he’s knocked so fucking sick that he rests his head down on the pillow and wraps the plain sheets between his fingers and he tries to search for Phil in the room of such fury, the room of such red. Everything is spinning, convulsing and turning and Dan laughs because he’s mad and he needs fucking help.

Needs pills in bottles with white caps.

Needs pens with no ink.

Needs sanity to drown him like it’s the ocean and he didn’t bother to get up off the beach when he saw the tide coming in.

The wallpaper isn’t floral.

There isn’t a TV set.

The carpet is ugly and the bed is uncomfortable and a woman with her husband’s blood on her hands didn’t kill herself in the walls.

No skeleton door frames.

No windowsills big enough to recite poetry.

No cigarette packets or record players or sinks with unwashed mugs.

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint but they say it didn’t make him happy.

They say he didn’t want to be.

And they say the ducks go home when the lake freezes over, say a bloodstain is orange if you wash it three or four times and faith is nothing but a dramatic mutation of optimism.

Dan’s hat is still backwards on his head when he forces his eyes shut.

The world has too much to die for and not enough poetry to convince him to stay.

: :

 _Bleak._ When he wakes again, it’s all bleak, and there’s nobody in the fucking room. A closed door and boring walls and a head empty of creativity like somebody’s taken it off his neck and shaken the words out of his ears.

He expects to find his heart on the sheets when he looks down for shit to string into sentences but it’s a different bed.

A different room.

He swings his legs over the side of the mattress and tries to run a hand through his hair but his hat’s in the way. So he takes it off, lays it down on the bed and rubs his knuckles into temples as if kneading the pain out of his mind.

Because he isn’t angry when he wakes. It’s a funny old thing. He’s got a tingling spreading over the flesh under his ribcage to remind him of his rage but he’s sick and he’s empty and it’s written all over his face. He’s slouching on the end of the bed, shoulders slumped and stomach weak and he puts his hands over his mouth when he feels it twist and turn. Over and over and over. There’s no fucking food in there—if any, not much, but he’s nauseous and fucking crying before his words whisper _homesick._

Homesick, homesick, homesick.

He gets up from the bed and sees Phil in the place beside him.

And it’s them there together, like it was in the eighteenth year and it was when they didn’t know anything and it was when there was nothing telling them they had to. Legs dangling down cupboards, thighs pressed on countertops, fingers moving over flushed skin. Dan’s life ends and begins with nostalgia and it cripples him when he gets up in some bullshit fucking city with rain threaded through its skyline so that he stumbles over his own feet and his ankles touch the floor before he’s knees. His father is there in his ears with a voice the same as the day he taught him to play football and the day he told him he didn’t have to be anything he didn’t want to. Dan Howell didn’t have to be a writer, Dan Howell didn’t have to be the gay kid, Dan Howell didn’t have to be the son of a hypocrite who didn’t realise he never should have been a father.

And Dan’s mother is there when he screws his shut with her hand on her hip, her grips in her hair, her temper asleep in the gentle upturns of her mouth. She’s there with her dress around her knees on the beach, with ice-cream melting over her fingers and lemonade sneaking down her chin. Toes in the sand, legs in the water, hands tight around rocks and sandals loose around feet and she’s got the grass of the country behind her frame in the passenger seat of a car packed full with bags and cases. She’s got heat smoothed over the shape of her cheeks, got red nails and red lips and red skin under under red frocks. They read tales together when Dan was too sad to form words, too sad to build to _happily ever after_ ’s out _none of us are gonna make it out okay._

And they didn’t, he thinks. Nobody made it out okay.

Because his mother doesn’t remember his name and he isn’t sure he remembers hers. And his father never came back home and he isn’t sure he ever wanted to. And his brother didn’t called him back and he isn’t sure he considered trying to. There was a funeral for Dan’s grandfather in the autumn of some time, when the air was supposed to smell like the beginning of another school year and skeletons strung up in porches to mark the wake of Halloween but instead it smelled like cocaine smuggled into jacket pockets. And it didn’t smell like leaves that crumbled under the heels of too-heavy boots, it smelled like forgetting the first grandchild’s name and writing words on the backs of wrinkled-hands because _I have to remember, I have to remember_. It smelled like dementia and drug addiction. It smelled like suicide and alcoholism.

It was static and open pill bottles and death like a fire exit when Dan’s house was burning down.

Because none of them made it out okay.

And Dan’s there in the hotel room on his hands and knees with nothing in his stomach and too much in his head and he’s not a fucking _romantic_ , he’s not a fucking _poet_. He called for God at twelve years old with three cheers of _I’m going to kill myself_ and _thank you, you fucker, for gifting me this life._ Hospital beds stripped down and cleansed, mouths pushed to the space under earlobes and prescriptions that should really just be written as _I know God ignored you, you can take some and forget._

Grief that hangs loose like rings on skinny fingers.

Hearts that thud slow and gums that bleed out and refrigerator light that washes over pale skin and bursts at the seams and Dan gets up off the floor to drag himself over to the man who looks just like his teenage lover, looks just the kid who wrote him stories about spacemen and lion cubs and blizzard-women. Green children and orange men and heaven on earth because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Distant breezes, empty perfumes bottles, blood clogged in the drain and black inked in the sky and blue rings around dark eyes like some poet tried to make a mockery of a silver-lining.

Dan’s shaking Phil’s shoulders and swallowing back his nausea every time it rises in his throat.

“ _Phil_.”

Sinking stomachs.

Graffitied flesh.

“Phil, please—”

Child abuse.

Domestic abuse.

Drug abuse and alcohol abuse and _one hit to tired me over_ , three packets of cigarettes and two kicks of two feet into a bedroom door and a broken jaw and—

A camera that shakes, a glass that spills.

Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint and it never made him happy.

“Dan, Dan—” Phil’s hoarse and groggy and treading carefully in his first moments. He wraps his arms around the crying man and lifts him up to his chest. “No, Dan, no, what happened? Why are you crying, sunshine, why are you crying?”

“Where’s y-your phone, Phil?” he whimpers, trying to push the contact from his body. No touch, no connection. If it doesn’t fucking touch him, it can’t ever fucking hurt him.

“My phone? My phone, baby, why do you want my phone?”

“I need it, P-Phil, I—”

“Why do you—”

“I need to call my _mom_ ,” Dan sobs, and clenches his fingers through his hair. Nobody ever fucking liked him anyway. “I n-need to tell her I’m sorry, Phil, I need to tell her I forgive her.”

“You don’t,” Phil’s got his lips to his ear. Dan can feel his breath and knows the inconsistency of his chest in enough detail to count the seconds between each stutter. The moments, the time, as if a heartbeat is a thunderclap and Dan doesn’t know how to get out of the storm. Because it’s raining, he thinks, and it won’t stop raining until the rain is done. “You don’t have to call her, baby, you don’t have to say sorry. She won’t answer, she won’t pick up. She doesn’t—Dan, she doesn’t care. You’re sick and sad, sunshine, sick and sad. She doesn’t know and doesn’t care and doesn’t want to hear it.”

Sick and sad.

Sick and sad.

Two omicrons in a sequence for a friend from a million miles away.

Orange on the skyline for a man who deserves the world but doesn’t realise that it doesn’t deserve him.

An addict and a lunatic, a friend to a lover and a lover to a spouse and seventeen groups of words with not enough left for the leading role to apologise to the people who don’t know his name and the people who wish they didn’t.

He shuffles himself off Phil’s lap and staggers across the carpet to this fucking door his mind says is the bathroom. It’s dull and dim, got a tub on the tiles and a sink in the corner and the hinges crack back through the despondency and the isolation to rest until Phil Lester decides he’s got to fucking follow.

But Dan’s exhausted his angry words.

He’s exhausted his sad ones, too.

So he slumps down next to the toilet and cries, “I miss you, I miss you,” as if he’s learnt fucking nothing and doesn’t remember fucking anything and he’s no goddamn artist, he’s no goddamn romantic.

It isn’t fucking cute.

It isn’t fucking funny.

Phil wraps his hands around his arms and stills his skeleton under his skin when he whispers, “What’s happening in your head, Dan? Tell me what’s happening, speak it all out.”

The Beatles made such pretty sounds.

The friends made such excellent stories.

The religion made such colourful emotions and the marriage made such a pitiful divorce.

“I d-don’t want to be here no more, Phil, I—” Dan clings to the man’s shoulders and wants to ask him why he didn’t hold him the night he fucked somebody else. He wants to ask him if his heaven would be a childhood bedroom or a thousand sheets of paper or a trip to Paris if he fucking believed in it. He wants to ask him if he remembers the time they ran with caskets of beer through the summer of a yellow year from the red and blue. The sirens, the law, the metal of jail cells and the shoes in plastic bags and they didn’t mean to do it, nobody ever means to do it.

Dan’s favourite book was _Don Quixote_. His favourite artist was Van Gogh. His best friends lived on the street he grew up on and his walls used to be cream before he helped to paint them blue and his father planted trees in the garden and stored his bikes in the shed. His mother didn’t like the taste of cider because it made her vomit when she was nineteen and she never buttoned her jacket up all the way because she didn’t want to feel like she was suffocating. She woke up at the same time every morning regardless of the day and regardless of the season and regardless of the year and she didn’t like the way she looked in glasses so she squinted until it wrinkled her nose and she laughed about the way her work colleagues teased her for her immaturity.

She fell in love and loved enough because people that are loveless love less than the loved less.

And Dan’s friends aren’t his friends. Dan’s husband isn’t his husband. Because their love is strange hotel rooms and beds oceans from home and Dan has his head on the tiles and his knees to his chest when he sobs, “It went so wrong, Phil, how did it go so wrong?”

Phil shakes his head and he’s crying.

“You were always a shitty f-friend, Phil, such a shitty friend,” Dan tries to push him away when he lays down next to him on the tiles but it’s weak and pathetic so he flutters his eyelashes and balls his fists. “Y-You never told me about Noah’s Ark. You never told me about _Don Quixote_. Soon never came, Phil, it never fucking came. You lied and you hurt me and I cried and I hurt you. And i-it keeps raining, it won’t stop raining. I want to go home.”

“You’re homesick,” Phil whimpers. He’s touching his hair. “Baby, you’re homesick, so sad and so homesick.”

Dan’s got his hands over his mouth again and his memories glazed over his eyes. His ribcage is swallowing his tummy like his throat used to swallow his fingers and the sink water swallowed his knuckles when he washed the blood from his hands.

Hits and kicks, skin soaked in acrylics and elastic pulled too far. Buckles on belts and inklings tickling like pink elephants and white tusks and oxygen vacating lungs and space pyjamas and Van Gogh and _I married my favourite author, doesn’t it fucking suck?_

“I want to go home,” Dan chokes again, and puts his arms over his face when Phil tries to kiss him. “N-No, Phil, I want to go _home._ ”

Backwards hats.

Thin curtains.

Crying skies.

Crooked minds.

Dan heaves and grips onto the toilet and he hopes he pukes up his fucking insides when he vomits every trace of nostalgia out of his fucking system.

Phil is holding onto his waist and whispering sadness into his ear and he says, “It’s okay, baby, I’m here. I’m here, you’re okay.”

Pulling chests.

Smears of sick.

Over and over and—

“I’m sorry,” Dan splutters. “I’m s-so sorry, I’m so sorry—”

A kiss like jam in the corner of a mouth.

A latch on a window in a hotel room.

Unsteady feet on too-thin ledges and honey and milk washed with streams of saliva and golden rings in murky puddles.

Childhood homes.

Childhood friends.

Drugs and writers and syrup and lovers.

_Write me a poem to make me happy._

“Shh, now, shh,” Phil’s running his fingers over the bumps in Dan’s spine. “Listen to me—Dan, hey. Sunshine, listen.”

Shakespeare.

Gauguin.

Monkey see, monkey do.

“You have to stay close to the things that make you glad you’re alive. And you have to write and you have to think. You’re not a poet, you’re a human. Hope and faith and pain but peace, Dan, peace. Yeah?”

Dan turns his head onto his shoulder. “Y-Yeah, Phil.”

Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint and it never made him happy.

“ _So God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can_ ,” Phil’s voice is heaven and heaven doesn’t exist. “ _And the wisdom to know the difference_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a sad chapter. I don’t know why, but I found it really emotional to write. I’m setting everything into place for the ending and it hurts a lot to begin to wish it goodbye, but it’s also very comforting. What did you think of this? What about Dan’s anger, and plea for help? Thanks for reading, as always x


	18. Echo

**number eighteen: echo**

_Dan_ is still sat on the floor with his husband stitched to his arm some time later. There’s a silence sewn to the skin of his wrists and saliva smeared down his chin. Sickness spat out and running to the bottom of his spine like sinkholes and plugholes and he’s been wearing the same pyjamas since number one. The collar’s folded against the skin of his neck and the fabric is loose, damp with vomit and sweat and his throat’s burning from the touches of his scarred knuckles.

He’s slumped against Phil’s chest with the man’s arms around his body and he’s got too many words to say on too little lines. Like a full head at seven-years-old, trying to fit a fist in a mouth.

Phil isn’t talking and Dan isn’t either, but the situation isn’t defined by words or phrases or little nothings that come and go as fleeting as a parent’s pride and admiration. It isn’t defined by noise and it isn’t defined by silence. No hushed voices, no timid whispers. For the first time, Dan thinks, everything is still. And all he has to think about is the fact that he is thinking and the fact that he is breathing and the fact that the words are written as synonyms in the dictionary he carved up the calves of his legs and around the elastic shape of his hips. They force-fed him nouns and stitched his lips with locutions after driving idioms past his glands with filthy hands that kneaded at his palate. They made him choke on ugly vocabulary until he woke feeling sick and regurgitated the words they’d pumped into his stomach onto a sheet of shitty paper. 

And the others, Dan knows, they don’t vomit. The romantics, the realists, the playwrights, the poets with the epics and the sonnets that come coupled with couplets just to bleed their narratives like they’ve ever fucking known bleeding. Dan eats the flesh of artistic expressions and pukes them out into pretty formations whilst they’re just fucking sitting there with their pens touching at their papers like a give-a-fuck mother touches her daughter’s hair. And they try so hard with their passions and their gifts to be intimate enough with language to breed offsprings formulated by spines and pages and they passed English with their talents whilst Dan sat and cried. Bygone voices, bottom of the class, being too intelligent to realise that the grades don’t matter as much as the red they’re written in. Technicality will never matter as much as the simplicity in the purity of impure writing. But they’re too scared of feeling saliva on their fingers so they just spit the words onto the page and _pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them._

People never fucking know what their words are worth.

People never fucking notice anything.

“We’re going to the theatre later, Dan,” Phil speaks and Dan thinks that if he took his voice and drew it out, there would be footprints along the sound. As if the weight of a person would be standing there in his tone. Dan tries to shake his head but his eyelids flutter and he’s fucking sick and fucking tired and he doesn’t want to hear his voice anymore than he does Phil’s. “Theatre, did you know? The theatre, sunshine, the—”

“Shut up,” Dan whimpers. He’s got his fingers pushed into his temple, his cheek against the palm of his hand and he kicks his foot against Phil’s chest and moves forward to raise limp wrists and shove him away. Weak, pathetic. “Stop it, Phil, shut up—Please, shut up. No sunshine, there’s no sunshine.”

Grey skies and grey shirts with threads loose around the edges and cotton wrapped around fingertips. Dan’s grandmother beneath a bulb of light, a silhouette cast across the furrowed shape of her brows and needles moving through silk. His mother’s favourite dress folded across her lap. Sitting cross-legged before the television screen. A fireplace and a mantelpiece and a mirror taped back on a red-patterned wall.

“There’ll be sunshine for the play,” Phil says. Sad and tired and angry. “There will, Dan, just you wait. Baby, just you wait for the sun.”

“I don’t _want_ the sun, Phil—Fuck the sun, I don’t—Phil, Van Gogh didn’t like yellow paint, he never—” Dan’s fingernails claw down the tiles drawn over the walls. Happy, happy, happy. Acrylics on the tongue, pink varnished over nails. Skin like a canvas, creativity collaged and plastered over cells and veins and eighteen years, eighteen calendars, sex on the kitchen floor with knuckles cut and bruised and whiskey hot around the white edges of teeth. Registry books within white weddings and wet wine stains on white shirts and flowers stuffed up the cuffs of blazers, flowers stuffed under the arms of men writing futures around _happy_ when it’s only ever before been _content_. Shoe polish, long aisles, guest lists and half-finished hymns and it rained the day Phil Lester pushed a golden ring over the knuckle of his lover.

And Dan just fucking thinks—with a shitty head against the shitty tiles of a shitty room—that he doesn’t fucking deserve anything. That his pain is just a measure of the difference between bad luck and fate and they’ve got the strings tied to his limbs curled up in their fists as if they’re trying to protest the tragedy of his very existence. His morality lays beaten like the man in the hotel hallway and the purple pills his mother held just below her wrist bone and the conscience of his father and the volume button acting as a remedy for guilt and the time spent spitting lies, the time spent stirring storms. Hysteria as the product of painful monotony. Coke and kicks and speed and sadness and _fuck you, fuck you, love you._ Grinding jaws, damp pillows, the white edges of teeth.

The white edges of teeth.

Phil’s crying and whining and he fucked somebody else and Dan’s ring is laying in a murky puddle of water on a vacant Paris street. They pushed so much of their shit up the faucet that it came gushing out when they tried to wash the blood from their hands.

Red over red.

Shakespearean syntax containing symbolisms so discrete, mattresses so concrete and friends too fucking troubled to ever get into trouble.

Dan’s thinking about the time they fucked on the floor when he digs his fingers into Phil’s shoulders and kisses him. He’s thinking about the wedding just as much as he is the bedsheets, just as much he is the money locked tight in the glovebox and Phil’s stomach quivering in the cold bathtub water. A son or a daughter or a mother or a father with alcohol tied around the loose ends of his name and stamped over the coloured pages of his schoolbooks. He’s the stain on his mother’s blouse and the friction-burn on the knees of the child who doesn’t know how to walk and the taste of metal on his tongue from the cross in the corner of his mouth.

He has Dan tight against his chest and he’s kissing his lips like he’s eighteen, he’s in love, they’re on the backseat and the Manchester sky is crying tears down over the glass of the car windows. Tender fingers to pale throats, sensitive and gentle and vulnerable and mild. Late in the autumn with brittle leaves and orange criss-crossed with grey and watching out for yellow lines painted down roadsides. Dusk on the horizon. City lights in the distance. Teenage lovers on second-hand seats with beer bottles and black jeans and radio stations.

“Dan,” Phil’s voice tastes like the kind-of heaven Dan’s head has emptied itself of nostalgia for. They’ve exhausted themselves of anything and everything they used to have and there’s no sun, there’s no yellow, no records or literature or sanity or religion. Van Gogh is dead and Dan will never see Theo again but his husband’s nose is against his jaw and his breath is tickling down the thin frame of his chest and they don’t believe in God but they don’t need a bible verse to depict the sentimentality of the beauty in the situation.

Dan’s fingers are loose around Phil’s grey shirt and his heart is steady, his breath is slow.

Dead phone lines.

Broken receivers.

He hates the small talk he makes when he has no fucking clue what else to say and he hates the way he clings to his knees before he vomits in parking lots on shots of who he should’ve been but he lets it go, for just a moment, and it’s as still as it should be when nobody wants it to be but nobody knows what to say. And they’ve survived too many minutes of silence to know that sometimes people just do better saying nothing at all.

So they say nothing at all.

And Phil holds him in his arms like he used to when he cried because his brother wouldn’t call him back and his father wouldn’t say sorry and he carries him through the room on unsteady feet with loose hands around wooden frames and they curl up on the frail mattress with the storm still speaking to the windows. Connectives connecting broken phrases and connectives connecting unconnected souls.

Dan listens to the water gushing down the street and keeps his face down against Phil’s neck, the bedsheets bandaged around his fragile grip. Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint and it never made him happy.

“I’m sorry,” Phil manages. Struggling, heaving. The effort is concealed behind the faint touches of his lips to Dan’s ear and he’s pathetic and he’s a failure but Dan’s chest drags for the memory of his heart rate in rhythm to the bass chords of their favourite albums and the feeling of his eyelashes against the skin of his hips. For trips to Paris and cigarettes packets on white sills and men with orange smiles and women with poetry passions. Backs to fourth walls and shirts tucked in at waistbands and completing shit in twos, completing shit in halves. Louis and Hélène and orange and red and black and aliens— _happy, happy, happy_ —printed into galaxies expanded over a shapeless spine. “I’m sorry, Dan, I didn’t—We didn’t mean for this to happen. I never meant to hurt you and—We can still be okay, sunshine, you’ll still be okay.”

Dan hushes him and tilts his head up against his chin. The eighteenth year. Lace curtains. Beige carpets. Skirting boards. A mind too big for a skull too small and everything clings to nothing like coats cling to hangers and paint clings to stomachs and they cling to one another like Dan’s mother clung to Dan’s father even though Phil swore they’d never be them. And he swore they’d be alright. And he swore they’d never fucking crumble under the weight of a thousand weights but Dan swore it too, he must have. So he murmurs, “I’m so tired, Phil,” and allows the man to cradle his codependency.

“You’re sick and sad, lovely boy,” Phil brushes his lips to the corner of Dan’s mouth. Self-injected happiness. Traces of syrup and cinnamon and tongues clad in impulsion with aftertastes of sin. “I’m sick and sad, too. We’re sick and sad. You lost your ring and—Sunshine, I’m sorry, I’m so—”

“I threw it, Phil,” Dan tells him. His throat scratches and burns. “I dropped it down in a puddle, on the step. It hurts me and you hurt me and I didn’t want it, Phil, I wanted it in the water. Gold and water and grey skies and pretty girls and space pyjamas and backwards hats. Christmas Eve, you got drunk on Christmas Eve. Do you remember, Phil? Please, Phil, you—Your bedsheets were white and the line was green and the flowers didn’t know how to droop on the bedside table.”

“You think too much,” Phil says, exhale coming between the words like yellow between the bristles. He touches a kiss to Dan’s temple and holds him against his collarbones and Dan pushes his face into his shirt so his lungs take in the alcohol and the sweat and the vomit and the tears. “You think too much and you don’t write poems no more. It’s been so long, baby, I don’t—I didn’t mean to touch her, I didn’t mean to touch her.”

Dan shakes his head and squeezes his scraggly arms around Phil’s waist.

Red.

Yellow.

Grey.

The man doesn’t believe in aliens and he’ll never believe in God and Dan realises he wants time to continue just as much as he never wants tomorrow to come around.

Phil sneaks his finger around Dan’s zero and nine under the sheets and holds the warm touch there, like the ink doesn’t matter and the ring didn’t either. There’s blood flowing under his skin and his leg is between Dan’s knees and he breathes and exists and tries and forgets and loves all he hates and hates all he loves and doesn’t know how to choose the people who choose him. Spirits and cocktails and hangovers. A consciousness overly-medicated, constructed and concluded as a little less than a lost cause.

“I don’t know who we are, Phil,” Dan says. He’s breathing through fabric pyjamas and and cut-up wrists and air clogged with promises forgotten before they could be broken. “You and Van Gogh and—Words and tales and stories and plots and—We did this to ourselves, Phil, we hurt ourselves and made it worse and my throat’s sore and my head’s sore and my arms are sore and my hands are sore and I don’t want to remember, I don’t—P-Phil, I’m so scared, I—”

“No, no,” Phil kisses the corner of his mouth again. Careful and meek and happy, happy, happy. “You’re going to—”

“I want to go to hospital, Phil,” Dan whines, and he’s crying again. Phil’s smoothing circles over the bones in his lower back and he hurt a man like he hurt his lover and he hurt his parents and he’ll hurt his child. “Y-You don’t understand, I have to go. I’m not very well a-and I want to be okay.”

“You’ll be okay,” Phil tightens his arms with the clenching of his gut. “No hospital, sunshine, please—They hurt you, it hurts you, you don’t—You’re not going. Shh, you’re not going.”

Dan sobs and tries to sit up on the mattress but Phil holds him in place and keeps him there in his arms. Eighteen and nineteen and twenty. He’s grazing gradual kisses over Dan’s cheeks and nose and jaw and lips and Dan’s too busy thinking about hospitals to think about heaven. Because there’s no heaven in a hospital like there’s no hospital in a heaven, although Dan thinks he’d have a maternity ward for the day his brother was born and thinks he’d have a terminal ward for the day his grandfather died. He’d have a waiting room for passing mothers and children with broken bones and maybe he’d have the white of the clinic but not the sterility.

Bits and pieces.

Shards of glass.

Strips of paper.

“I need to g-get better, Phil. I’m sick and you’re sick and sick people can’t get better with o-other sick people—”

“Stop it now, stop,” Phil compresses his whimpers with kisses sugared in stale memories and they’re still before they’re moving, quiet before they’re loud. The bed is uncomfortable and the atmosphere is stiff but Dan’s got fistfuls of grey shirt and guesses as to what will happen next stored in the creases at the corners of his eyes when he smiles but he can’t fucking remember how to smile. And even if he could, he probably wouldn’t. Because the air doesn’t make room for sadness like it does for happiness and maybe Dan would rather struggle with not being able to breathe than to just be happy.

Phil settles against Dan’s settled body and says, “I love you. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how to explain it and I don’t know how to handle it but I love you, Dan. I love you.”

Dan’s eyelashes are damp and fluttering and he whimpers, “No,” under his breath.

“Please,” Phil moves his lips to his forehead. He’s dumb and naive and too young to realise that everything is better without connections and ties and Dan wishes he’d never fucking touched anybody. He wishes he’d been a doctor, he wishes he’d studied medicine. He wishes the world would determine his fate and spit it at him like he fucking deserves but there’s only ever airy silence and only ever twiddling thumbs and Phil tells him he loves him but Dan’s heart was slashed open by the same sound. So he’s just laying there with his eyes screwed shut and his organs packed tight in his chest and he’s thinking about his ring loose on his skinny finger. “I love you.”

“You don’t,” Dan breathes. “You can’t.”

Doors splintering back on their hinges. Faucets cleansing cuts on knuckles pushed too far behind drywalls. Faces flushed red with surges of anger and tempers flaring around sensitivity and vigilance and Phil’s hips over a woman’s, Phil’s saliva over her skin. His fingers brushing under strapless clothing and his hands tight around shirt-hems and his muscles flexing loosely at the bottom of his spine. Milky skies and bloody arms and hospital food and handles on medicine cabinets. Phil Lester hasn’t loved Dan Howell since the day his apprehensive voice staggered over his nerves and he read him his first draft aloud and then kissed his throat with delicate teeth. He hasn’t loved him since he told him tales, since he held his hands and questioned his state and ran warm water in bathtubs to soak his body in fragile hope and mild optimism. Since he kissed his mouth and tugged his hair and mewled for his touch against his flushed skin. He’s not been in love with Dan since the day with the white and the flowers and the gatherings and it’s a fucking tragedy, but their minds are just wired with what used to be.

“I do,” Phil is whispering. Their chests are together. “I love you, baby, I—Say you love me, too. Say it.”

Dan shakes his head. Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint and it never made him happy and Phil’s shirt reeks of everything he promised he’d never be just as much as it reeks of false longing. He’s touching Dan’s arms and touching Dan’s thighs and he slips his cold hand up the front of his pyjamas like he’s craving what he doesn’t deserve, craving what he’ll never have. He runs his teeth over Dan’s shoulder and tries for friction with their waists but Dan pushes him away and shuffles aching bones along the mattress.

“Don’t touch me,” he sobs. “I don’t w-want you to touch me. You hurt me, y-you always hurt me and—Fuck you, I hate you, d-don’t touch me.”

“I’m sorry, Dan, I—” Phil reaches for him but Dan thrashes him away and he’s shuffling over the mattress when the door opens and Louis enters with Hélène walking just behind him. They’ve got brown bags and stacked coffees and there’s rainwater seeping through their tight clothes and tangled hair but they’re beautiful and they’re kind. Dan doesn’t know how to apologise for the shit he’s done but he looks at them and his shoulders bow like a shitty actor after a shitty performance. He’s got filthy hands with red under his nails and ink on his thumbs and he grabbed them and clutched them and held them so he smeared all his shit over their virtue. Or maybe they were never fucking pure and maybe he was never fucking responsible and maybe they all deserve one another but they’re too selfish to realise that their standards begin and end in the same way. God doesn’t like Dan and God doesn’t like Phil, but he doesn’t like Louis and he doesn’t like Hélène and it’s all so fucking _fine_ , it’s all so fucking _great._ Dan’s angry at his friends and angry at his husband and angry at religion and angry at his head. He deserved more than he was given and God doesn’t like him but if he did, he wouldn’t pray for him anyway.

No words wasted and no words lost.

Hélène puts the food down and says, “Hey, what happened? Dan, why are you crying?”

“I—” he’s choking on the world’s mistakes because everything is his fucking fault. “H-He tried to touch me, Hélène, he tried to love me and I don’t l-love him and I don’t want him and—”

Phil’s spitting that he’s sorry but Dan doesn’t give a fuck. Louis is orange and trying and his mother died because she was hurting.

“Hey, now, calm down,” Hélène kneels before Dan on the carpet and puts her hands on his arms. “You don’t have to get yourself worked up, okay, you don’t have to do anything and it’s alright to be scared. Are you scared?”

Dan nods and cries for his mother and Hélène moves to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. She holds an arm around his tiny body and stitches their sides together with consideration for Dan’s vulnerability. He rests his weight against hers and she tells him, “I’m here and so is Louis and so are words. You’re scared of your head because your head’s created such a mess and you can’t decide whether you’re in love or you never want to feel anybody ever again and it’s okay to be frightened of shit that has no middle ground because it’s always cold and always empty. But some things have to be simple, Dan, some things can’t be exhausted and flushed out of their ingredients because all you’ll get is disappointment sitting heavy in your hands like a bible book or a lover’s heart you don’t know how to put back into place. And so we have to make it as simple as fear and as simple as guilt and as simple as some breakfast, as simple as a coffee. It’s not Phil in the days you loved him or your mother in the days she said your name. It’s just breakfast and coffee. This moment, we have breakfast and coffee and we listen to the rain because we’re searching for solace in the storm. Violent winds and early mornings and stories whispered between rushes of water.”

“Stories,” Dan sniffs. He can’t hear his pulse in his ears anymore. There’s a serenity to the lethargy developing in the situation. Sad and slow and simple. “I love stories, I—Hélène, do you know any stories?”

She’s retrieving the brown bag and a cup of coffee and opening the food on her lap. She takes out a croissant and holds it beneath Dan’s face and says, “Take it, dear, it’s breakfast. I can tell you a story.”

Dan’s fingers take the food and he holds it a distance away from himself for a while.

“When Louis and I were out, the little kids were heading down the streets for school,” she tells him. “There were so many of them, all dressed in their uniforms and dressed in their jackets and they were holding pink umbrellas over their small heads. They were dancing through the puddles, Dan, skipping over the street.”

“I love children, Hélène,” he says. God smudged purple under his eyes so the world would know he didn’t deserve to sleep. “Children are my friends and children are sad and I don’t know how to fix it, I don’t know how to—”

“Shh, no, shh,” Hélène hushes him. “Don’t think, Dan, don’t think. Children were playing in the streets. Simple, love, so simple. And your breakfast, that’s simple too. Do you like coffee?”

Dan nods. Murky stains in the corners of his page, traces stuck to Phil’s gums and sitting there on his tongue. “Yeah.”

There are galaxies printed bigger on his shoulders and a croissant tight in his hands that tastes so sweet when he puts it in his mouth. His jaw clicks and clenches, grinds and aches and his stomach groans for the food whilst his head thinks about not thinking and not thinking thinks about Paris. He’s busy behind his forehead, busy inside his skull, and Hélène brushes her thumb over the little bumps in his spine as he eats his way through the delicacy.

She’s so lovely, Dan thinks, so divided and so different and so figurative and so complex. She doesn’t end where she’s supposed to, she doesn’t know when to stop. But her words drip like Dan’s shirt on grey and rainy school days and he’s yearning for all the syllables as he imagines his mother ringing her voice out. Her halves and her hair and her diction, her definition, her ocean and her strength and her love and admiration. She’s the kind-of person who could take everything but the everything wouldn’t deserve her and Dan doesn’t love an awful lot anymore but he loves the sound of her voice. He loves the silence in the moments of introspection and he loves the prediction for what she’ll say next. He loves the poetry and the simplicity and the reasoning and the explanation and he’s a timid voice down a quiet receiver in the middle of the night. She’s streetlights and balconies and he’s nothing but the concrete and the coffee tastes like home when it touches the back of his throat.

The coffee tastes like Phil.

The coffee tastes like Monday.

The coffee tastes like coffee.

“It’s good food, isn’t it?” Hélène whispers with a smile curling the edges of her lips. “Don’t think too much now, dear, come up with me the top of the bed and you can lay down. Shuffle across, yeah? It’s okay, go on.”

So Dan passes her his drink and doesn’t think about his husband with his legs over the mattress and Louis standing before him with food under his arms. He thinks simple thoughts with simple conclusions and puts his head on the pillow and brings his knees to his chest. Hélène draws the sheets over his body and rests his cup of coffee on the bedside table.

“Sleep a little more now, okay?” she says. “You haven’t slept enough and you need to for the theatre. We’re going, you remember? Later, to see—”

“Hélène,” Dan says.

“Yeah?”

“Did you see my ring? In the puddle outside the—”

“No, love,” Hélène shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see it. We looked, but I don’t think it was there.”

“No, Hélène, it was. I dropped it there, I promise I did.”

“We can look again sometime soon,” she whispers and tucks the sheets higher up to his face. “Sleep now, Dan. Sleep.”

No words wasted and no words lost.

: :

“We’re not taking him, Louis, we’re not taking him. Fuck you, we’re not taking him.”

“I’m just saying we should _consider_ it, how can you say you love him if you don’t even want to consider what could be best for him?”

“It isn’t best,” Phil’s voice is there when Dan stirs to consciousness. The side of his face is mushed into the pillow and he’s facing the window, blurred by condensation. “You don’t know what’s best for him, Louis, you don’t know anything. He’s my husband and—”

“You make him fucking sick,” Louis says. “And he makes you sick, too. It isn’t healthy for either of you to keep existing beside one another when you’re as ill as you are. The marriage didn’t work, Phil, you can’t fix this shit anymore. He doesn’t want to want you and he’s just trying to feel better because—somewhere in his broken fucking head—he knows he can a distance away from you. He has more of a chance, Phil, a hospital is good for him.”

“He hates hospitals,” Phil’s emotional and desperate. “He hates them, I know he hates them. He can’t do it by myself, Louis, you can’t make me make him do it by himself. I love him.”

There’s rustling and Dan’s eyes flutter shut again. Exhaustion buried under his flesh. “You don’t love him. He doesn’t love you. You need to stop lying to yourself. Can you please just put your shit out on so we can think about leaving soon?”

“No, Louis,” Phil says. “I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to be with you. I want Dan and I want to drink and I want to love him but I don’t remember how.”

“You’re not drinking anything. Fuck, no, not anymore. We’re going to the theatre and we’re going to watch the play because Hélène likes them and Dan likes them and it’s Shakespeare and it’s good. Expensive, but good. Get your shit on.”

“No, Louis—He’s still sleeping, Louis.”

“I’ll wake him soon, don’t touch him. You know he doesn’t want you to touch him.”

“I love him—”

“Phil, shut up,” Louis snaps. “Whatever the hell you think you feel, he doesn’t want it right now. He’s sick and scared and you’re both too delusional to be juggling realism so stop thinking for a second and just be. If you loved him, you’d leave him alone.”

There’s an extension of silence and Dan can hear his husband’s breath like he used to when they slept in his childhood bedroom. Cramped together in the single bed. It knots his stomach and turns it over.

“I don’t want you to take him to the hospital, Lou.”

Louis puffs a short breath. “We can’t talk about this anymore now. When the play’s finished, we’ll come back and—”

A door sounds and Hélène’s voice echoes through the room, breathes in and fits itself into the tightly compact air. Dan rubs his eyes with the backs of his hands and watches her exit the bathroom clad in fresh clothes and a white towel strung over her shoulder.

He pushes himself up in the bed and stares out the window. The sky’s a softer grey than it was when he cried and the children aren’t on the streets, the lights are lit for the traffic. It’s a grey stained with the bleakness of late evening and there’s no orange to soak over the skin of single mothers. There’s no skeletal door frames or floral patterns or folded sheets or empty ledges. No slanted rooftops or beds of flowers or tears over the glass of TV sets or The Beatles spinning pretty sounds on age-old players. Dan can’t remember the taste of smoke or his husband’s tongue or why beauty is paralleled with cynicism and romance is paralleled with gore. Clichés stacked and carried like moving boxes and ornaments and nostalgia and Dan’s father never came home like Dan’s brother never answered his phone.

“Hey there, buddy,” Louis says from across the room. He’s shrugging a jacket onto his shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

Dan blinks and feels for his red hat. “Are we going to the theatre?”

“Yeah,” Louis nods. “I went out, managed to buy some tickets. We don’t have a lot of cash left but it’s worth it, for the play. Are you alright?”

Dan pushes his legs off the end of the mattress and shuffles down the bed. His trainers are some feet away beside the door and his pyjama shirt hangs loose over the shape of his shoulder. They’re watching and he hates it and he hates them but he doesn’t and if he knew what the fuck he was talking about, he’d probably have to say sorry for it. But he’s confused by the very existence of the confusion for his existence and he’s held enough pills in his hands to kill himself and fill the body and he wishes he fucking knew whether or not he was alright. He wishes he fucking knew whether or not he would ever be again. And he wishes he fucking knew how to pave himself the road to _getting there_ but he’s never even been able to read a map. He knows only how to navigate to a better fucking time because he wrote the directions as two numbers on his ring finger so he’d never forget but they don’t tell you that the worst part of sadness is remembering the happiness.

That you’re better off just never being happy at all.

“Hey, here you go,” Hélène passes Dan his shoes from the floor when he realises he’s ventured halfway across the room. Unsteady feet, unstable posture. Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint and it never made him happy. “Can you put them on, love?”

“We’re going to see Shakespeare, Hélène,” Dan says. He sits back on the bed and pulls his thin leg up to fix his shoe on his foot. “Shakespeare, you like him. Phil does too.”

Louis is smiling at him. “Are you excited?”

“Yeah, Lou, I’m excited. Shakespeare and dreams and stages and plays,” Dan wraps his fingers around his laces and tugs them tight and he feels the threads pull but they’re not positioned right. Not in place, not looped together. He breathes frustration out of his cracked lips and tries to tie them again but his patience wears thin like the pyjamas over his skin.

“Let me do it, buddy,” Louis says. He kneels before Dan and takes the laces between his fingers. “You slept for a while, it did you good. You’ll be feeling okay for the theatre now and you can watch it all without feeling tired. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dan whispers. Phil’s staring at him from an off-angle and he feels sick. Coffee and croissants. “Can we go now, Lou?”

“Yeah, I think it’s time,” Louis gets up from the floor and walks over to string his bag onto his bag. “Do you have the tickets, Hélène?”

She nods and smiles at him and waits for Dan to approach her before turning to unlock the hotel door. She slips her hand onto his back to guide him and Phil says, “Dan, no, you can’t wear pyjamas. No pyjamas, sunshine, you can’t wear them tonight.”

“Leave it, Phil,” Hélène tells him. “It’s fine. They won’t not let us in, we paid. They’re too desperate to entertain.”

“Desperate to entertain,” Dan echoes. He’s fiddling with the buttons on his pyjamas. “Desperate to entertain, they’re desperate to entertain.”

Hélène smiles. “That’s how it goes, dear. Theatre and music and writing and painting.”

They head out down the hotel hallway and Phil’s voice is pushed under Dan’s ribs, bobbing in the back of his throat and he’d puke it up if he had the energy but he’s got fucking nothing. The empty shell of a writer, a husband and a brother and a son and a friend and it doesn’t matter if he knows how to fix shit because he’ll never be given the chance. And he knows he should stop thinking, he knows he should stop thinking about stopping thinking but he’s never done the things he should and he’s never done the things he said he would.

He never should have come to Paris and he never should have studied Van Gogh and he never should have taken narratives and printed them into dramatic monologues because he was dumb enough to think that anybody gave a fuck about how he bled himself dry for a man who wouldn’t prick his finger for their deceased marriage. He never should have gotten into Louis’ car at the airport and he never should have left Phil alone to drink outside with Hélène and he never should have missed his grandfather’s funeral and he never should have called his brother and he wonders if he knew he’d be walking down a cold street in space pyjamas and worn trainers, he’d still have touched Phil Lester anyway.

Car wheels over tarmac, traffic lights on roadsides and tight dresses on street corners and people never fucking notice anything. Skipping meals and fussing parents and _I don’t want that, I don’t want anything_ but _just ask me another fucking time and maybe I’ll say yes._ Two fingers, wet knuckles, heaving stomachs and sore throats and arched backs over small toilets in cramped bathrooms beside running sinks. Packets of mints with packets of cigarettes and pages and tissues and papers turned in two weeks too late, subliminal hits at pitiful parents and lines through _failing_ to fit in _trying._

The theatre looks like an old friend standing there on the street. There’s a queue of people with obnoxious voices and obnoxious smiles and Dan doesn’t give enough of a fuck about any of them to scratch down an appearance. Pretentious and aristocratic, a shitty hand dealt by Paris. They speak in open bibles or some shit, and Dan much prefers praying to Gods he doesn’t believe in.

No words wasted and no words lost.

They stall on the street for too long. Some time into the hour, it starts raining again, and Louis stretches his jacket to cover Dan’s trembling shoulders. The protection is thin and does little but Dan doesn’t mind, for the rain is cool on his skin and the wind feels nice against the damp textures. He shivers and he shakes and he shouldn’t think but he thinks about bleeding and he’s as pathetic as the man standing in a grey shirt at his side. Too close, too far. Muddled heads and muddled relationships and Dan needs a fucking hospital but he’s waiting around for a theatre show and his heaven is a place where they’re the same thing. His heaven is a place where Phil holds him without touching him like he’s desperate for release and he doesn’t treat him like something he can crack back in his hands or push deep into his arm or discard on the floor when he’s had enough. He spits love into situations where the love’s all dried up and he gets what he craves, fucks up what he pleases. Times the seconds of nothing with ordered pieces of vodka bottles and drinks enough to be an alcoholic but not enough to satisfy himself and Dan pities his state like he pities the story because he can’t write a romance without writing division.

Endings as shit as beginnings.

Sad and happy and yellow and red and no middle ground for the people in the middle, no middle ground to store the shit not wanted either end.

Their seats are up high with a slanted view of the stage. It’s got a curtain drawn neat and rows of shadows sitting before it under the dim lights above their heads. The scene is grand—a production within a production—and the craft of the building is as ostentatious as it is simplistic. Dan’s sat beside Hélène, cramped on the end, and he doesn’t look down at his thighs pressed together but he can feel the friction of his bones and the flow of his blood between his ears. He can taste metal when he runs his tongue over his gums and the rough surface of his teeth and he doesn’t know how to cut himself so deep he doesn’t bleed but he feels enough shit to try.

He’s made enough mistakes to try.

He’s hurt enough people to try.

Nobody would fucking care if he died and if they did, they’d get over it a breath into a bottle-top and a line from his tale and he’s so fucking irrelevant that he’ll be remembered as the one who tried not to be irrelevant in a room of relevance. He doesn’t know what he stands for and doesn’t know what he believes in. He doesn’t know the colour of his aliens and doesn’t know if he likes God and doesn’t know if he cares for his sanity as much as he does art.

There’s a palace in Athens and a love coiled with a dream. Four young Athenians, attraction and marriage and harmony and celebration. Everybody’s in love with everybody but nobody’s really in love with anybody and Dan watches with mist clouded over the dark colour in his eye. 

“ _Hey now, my love! Why is your cheek so pale?  
How chance the roses there do fade so fast?_”

“ _Belike for want of rain, which I could well  
Beteem them from the tempest of my eyes_.”

“ _Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,  
Could ever hear by tale or history,_  
The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Love-in-idleness. Pansies and milk-white moonlight between trees. The King’s servant, Robin or Puck, performing fiendish acts in exchange for gifts and existing in the loneliness of forests at midnight.

“ _The king doth keep his revels here to-night:  
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;_  
 _For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,  
Because that she as her attendant hath_  
 _A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;  
She never had so sweet a changeling;_  
 _And jealous Oberon would have the child  
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;_  
 _But she perforce withholds the loved boy,  
Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy:_  
 _And now they never meet in grove or green,  
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,_  
 _But, they do square, that all their elves for fear  
Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there_.”

He’s small and grotesque and the audience is an accumulation of scrunched-up noses and disapproval towards the devilish actions. Dan’s heart thuds steady with the fear of puncturing the fragility of the production’s scenes.

“ _Either I mistake your shape and making quite,  
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite_  
 _Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are not you he  
That frights the maidens of the villagery;_  
 _Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern_  
 _And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;  
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;_  
 _Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?_  
 _Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,  
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:_  
 _Are not you he?_ ”

Puck, Puck, Puck.

Happy, happy, happy.

Romance and comedy and Dan’s contentment is stitched with distraction because creativity is the medication they never fucking prescribed him. They didn’t know how to treat him, they didn’t know how to cure him. His sickness is contagious through his words and his passages and he diseased their remedies when he used them in his work. He personified prescriptions and stripped psychiatry of its solution and credibility so sloshy nostrums and _try again_ ’s were all that was left behind.

He convinced himself he could use vocabulary to put shit right but he isn’t a fucking writer because nobody fucking wanted him and he probably didn’t want them either.

“ _A foolish heart, that I leave here behind_.”

Just publication deals and technical accuracy and professional editors and false criticism.

Dan worked pens through the night to exercise his mind and produce drafts they spat at and packaged back to him like they never meant a fucking thing. He learnt nothing from trying but that you should never tell anyone everything you know and you should never give the sketch of yourself to a person not willing to colour between the lines. Because everybody Dan Howell has ever known has just been one big fucking disappointment and he’s evaluated enough failures to understand that he’s just as much the problem as the rest of the world. That he’ll never be fucking different, no matter how hard he tries. And he’s lied through his teeth a million times, stilled the presence of a million too-quick inhales and written out a million attempts at _I’m not the same as you_ but he’s not fucking _different._

He’s not fucking _unique._

His mind’s plain sailing on the ocean of relation and the salt in the tide always tastes the same as the time before.

“ _This is thy negligence: still thou mistakest,  
Or else committ’st thy knaveries wilfully_.”

The music doesn’t sound right and Phil never charged his fucking phone and it’s been too long since Dan watched him write down the shit that made him feel. The music, the moment, the forgotten and the noticed. The kids with scuffed-up shoes and the kids with scuffed-up hearts and the parents who don’t know how to start in the same way they don’t know how it’ll end. Folded limbs like cardboard prints in social situations and connections tested, tugged and pulled like home phone cords by the quick fingers of violent parents.

Dan’s mother sat at the kitchen table and took pills she hadn’t been prescribed. She ripped labels from bottles like bandaids from Dan’s knees and wrote _for learning how to kiss somebody else_ on the backs before she stuck them down again.

For learning how to kiss somebody else.

For learning how to fit in new shirts.

For learning that strength is only ever an accident.

“ _My lord, I shall reply amazedly,  
Half sleep, half waking: but as yet, I swear,_  
 _I cannot truly say how I came here_.”

Dan’s looking up at the oval ceiling and he’s thinking about Christmas with his grandparents and his cousins and they’re lining up in the snow with their hands stuffed into their pockets. The eighth year and the ninth, the tickets and the confectionary and he’s running in his tenth year in a football jersey smeared with _I’m trying_ and white shorts with green stains riding up his little thighs. Theatre shows and Saturday games and his parents didn’t raise him on technique or virtuosity but he became an artist in the field of misinterpretation. He didn’t study arithmetic and he didn’t study business and he didn’t study medicine because he didn’t give a fuck about anything but language. There are memories printed along coordinates and sheets of nostalgia bunched up in his cornea. An x axis running over both of his wrists but he isn’t a mathematician and he isn’t a scientist.

He chose the shit that allowed him to depict emptiness as the lovechild of negligence and solitude. The shit that allowed him to snap leads and graffiti walls and label eruptions of anger and troubles with the law as dramatic similes and melancholic metaphors and—

“ _Asleep, my love?  
What, dead, my dove?_”

Dan Howell was the kid who drew the pictures people wouldn’t notice if they slipped off the refrigerator door. He was the kid who memorised page numbers of his favourite lines in his favourite books and he was the kid who didn’t pass English, the man who never made it. Married into divorce and stretched at all his limbs and he’s an imitation of the mistakes his parents didn’t mean to make.

His psychiatrist hasn’t told him anything for a long time and his husband doesn’t read poetry like a blind man reading braille when he touches his skin. His stanzas are hoardings of inpatient waiting rooms and purple flowers planted around the windows of institutions and they sound like _help_ now as if they never sounded like _okay._ As if memories are just tunnel visions and distance is just time and people are just people with minds they’re not sure how to treat.

“ _Never excuse; for when the players are all  
dead, there needs none to be blamed_.”

Finger-links and stolen cigarettes and self-derogation and the fourteenth year.

Such hesitance, such softness.

Dan’s brother whimpering under blue bedsheets and the ribs of an incidental author and a subconscious with a yellow paintbrush and empty canvas.

Manchester Station and single beds and the eighteenth year, the nineteenth year, the twentieth and twenty-first and Van Gogh didn’t eat yellow paint because he never wanted to be fucking happy.

Dan’s suddenly shuffling down the row of seats, shifting knees and apologising under his breath and the characters are still moving on the stage. The lighting is dull and his friends are a distance away but his feet reach the stairs and he keeps fucking going.

Over and over and over.

Fucking nutcase.

Fucking failure.

Fucking madman.

Fucking mess.

“ _The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve:  
Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time._”

The world owes Dan nothing but it convinced him he owes it everything and he works beauty from natural states like everything is pure. There’s a crushed sunflower in the pocket of Louis’ shitty bag and he killed it but he loved it because it’s yellow and it’s happy.

It’s walls and paint and dictionaries and gospels.

They never went to fucking Arles.

They never noticed Louis on the plane.

They never made the right decisions and never pressed the right buttons and Dan leaves the theatre on quick strides and starts down the street in a desperate hurry.

“Dan!”

He shouldn’t have stuffed the cash in the glovebox and he shouldn’t have noticed the milk in the sky and he should have tried harder with his father like he should have apologised to his mother because he’s got a mind capable of making every fucking thing fault.

“Dan, what are the hell are—Dan!”

It’s Hélène.

And then it’s Louis.

And then it’s Phil.

They’re fucking running and fucking panting and fucking choking on the oxygen with the omicrons in their lungs. The music, the moment, the forgotten and the noticed. The shallow bathwater and the tassels on the hoodies and the acrobats on the tightropes and the shirts on the washing lines. There are hands around Dan’s arms and he jolts to a halt and Louis holds him so orange, squeezes him against his stomach.

“Dan, lovely, Dan,” he manages, between puffs of breath. “What are you doing, buddy? What are—What are you doing?”

“Get off me, Louis—” he chokes. Tears and heaves and hips and pyjamas and it’s raining on the bare skin of his shoulder. “Get off me, I—Please, get off.”

“Where are you trying to run to, Dan?” Hélène speaks. Her hair’s damp and stuck to the side of her face and Dan clenches his fist to capture the sight of her standing on the street. Red and black but washed with grey, concluding moments and wisps of breath.

“I’m going,” he whimpers. He moves back and holds his hands before him like _don’t touch me, don’t come near me, I’m so sorry I hurt you_. Like he’s done too much to too many people and he doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up like he doesn’t know how to ask for help. “I have to go, Hélène, I’m sick and sad and I have to go.”

“What?” Louis says. “Dan, no, you—Where? Go where?”

“I want to be on my own, Lou. I need to—I’m going to get my ring.”

“Your ring?” Phil echoes. “My ring?”

“I need to find it,” Dan says. He wipes his sleeve over his face. “I have to look and—and I want to go by myself.”

“ _I fear we shall out-sleep the coming morn  
As much as we this night have overwatch’d_  
 _This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled  
The heavy gait of night._”

“No,” Louis shakes his head. “You’re not going by yourself.”

“I am, Lou,” Dan says. “I—I have to go. I’ll come back.”

“You will?” Hélène speaks. She shrugs her jacket from her body and passes it over to him. “Take this, love, you—You’ll freeze to death before you get there if you don’t.”

“Hélène,” Louis is watching her. The rain is hard on the street. “He can’t go alone, he can’t do it. Don’t—No, he can’t.”

“I’ll come back,” Dan says. He’s shivering under Hélène’s jacket. “Soon.”

Soon.

“I don’t care when you’ll come back, Dan, you’re not okay to be on your own,” Louis challenges. “Come back inside, come on—You’re missing the end of the play.”

“I’m going,” he repeats. There’s sadness etched through his tone, printed and indented. Hopelessness to juxtapose the direction of solitude. “I need to be on my own, Lou, I don’t want to—I have to think.”

“You won’t come back,” Louis says. “You know you won’t, you’ll forget or get distracted or get too deep into your own head that you fucking—Dan, you’ll hurt yourself and we’ll never see you again.”

“No, Louis,” Dan shakes his head. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay. I know how to be okay now.”

“Buddy, you—”

“Dan,” Phil tries to wrap his hands around the man’s body but Dan pushes him back.

“No, Phil. No. I have to get the ring.”

“I can get you a new—”

“You _can’t_ ,” Dan shakes his head. Guilt. Faith. Salvation. He reaches forward and pushes himself into Phil’s chest and it’s desperate and it’s quick and they cling to one another’s shirts and bodies under the light weight of the storm. “I’m okay, Phil, I—I can be okay. Let me be okay. On my own for a while, I can be okay.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Phil holds him. “Sunshine, I don’t want you to. How long will you be?”

“Soon,” Dan says. “I’ll be back soon.”

And then he’s got his arms around Louis and he’s holding onto the orange as it spills between his fingers and it’s wrong and they’re stupid and Louis spits shit about safety but it doesn’t fucking matter. Dan thinks maybe once Hélène said that she didn’t like hugs so he holds her with a fragility and she squeezes him once. She’s red and he’s blue and Paris is so purple and she had to be somewhere she never fucking reached. She says, “Stay safe, yeah? You know. Be back soon.”

And Dan says, “Yeah, Hélène. Soon.”

“ _Sweet friends, to bed.  
A fortnight hold we this solemnity,_  
 _In nightly revels and new jollity._ ”

“Dan, buddy,” Louis has shrugged his bag off and is digging through the contents. He retrieves his pad and tears out a sheet and there’s water all over the surface from the heavy rush of rain but it doesn’t change a fucking thing. “Aliens, I finished it. The drawing. Look at it under the streetlights as you go.”

“I will, Lou,” he manages. Hoarse and strained but raw with sincerity. Orange, orange, orange.

Soon never really comes around.

“You should take my phone, Dan,” he says. “You might need to call somebody if—”

“I’m coming right back. I’m coming right back soon, Lou, with Phil’s ring below my knuckle and—I love you, you people,” Dan’s voice trembles like knees dripping with cool pool water. Summer nights. Pale skies. Damp grass and wet footprints and nine, ten, eleven.

“ _So shall all the couples three  
Ever true in loving be_.”

Crappy coffee hidden under tongues and stronger tastes on weekday mornings and _Don Quixote_ open on the dresser with folded page-corners. Passages from Spanish literature to wish sad eyes to sleep, boys and men with sorrowful smiles mended to their faces. The draw of Dan’s mother’s chest beside him in the bed and the weak puff of her breath into the sheets. The locked doors, the angry fathers, the guilt and regret and _I’m sorry you saw that darling, let’s read that story you like._

“Take my phone,” Louis forces the phone into Dan’s hand with the rumpled sheet of paper. “Hélène’s contact’s in there. You can call her, we’ll answer. Do you know how to do that?”

Dan doesn’t say anything because he’s thinking and he’s crying but he’s okay and he’s alright. The breeze catches in the back of his throat when he tries to grasp the art he’s made of respiration and Louis taps his fingers against the phone screen because he’s demonstrating something Dan doesn’t and isn’t trying to care for.

“ _And each several chamber bless,  
Through this palace, with sweet peace;_  
 _And the owner of it blest  
Ever shall in safety rest_.”

“Just text like that, if you—If anything happens, okay? If you can’t get back. You will, won’t you? You promise?”

“Yeah, Lou,” Dan says. He holds tight onto the phone and the aliens and thinks about his friends and thinks about their colours. He thinks about his husband when they stood in the registry office, when they danced on steady feet and touched with tender hands and breathed affection into the spaces of air between their necks and shoulder blades. Their mouths positioned together under dull club lights and their fingers faintly clutched to collars of loose blazers. Close hands, first dances, white displays and pretty flowers and calls to cancel, curls in mirrors. Hair tumbling down over brows and kisses down bare throats and sounds of violence, sounds of disappointment. Broken glass, bloody fingers. Vows, alters, stained-glass, _love you_ , _fuck you_ , _want you_ , _need you to stay._

Pink for lipstick stains and red for fucking somebody else and green for faithful children and grey for an empty marriage.

“ _Trip away; make no stay;  
Meet me all by break of day_.”

They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. And sometimes people do weird shit to make them happy, like cracking bottles just to line their pieces so they can try and compare shards of glass to a relationship that made them ink numbers on their skin just to cover them with a golden ring. Like tasting the ends of black pens to write a quatrain about four minutes in the middle of Manchester station, four eyeballs and four fingers and four _I love you_ ’s, _just so you don’t forget._

People do weird shit to make them happy.

People have always done weird shit to make them happy and sometimes you can feel nothing but sometimes you can try and there’s a thin line between happiness and settling for close. There’s a thin line between misery and not knowing where to start and there’s a thin line between marriage and having no courage to walk away and Dan’s too fucking sick of being the one with no sense. He’s too fucking sick of being the one who doesn’t know shit and doesn’t understand shit and getting married is like crossing a road but Dan didn’t know how to look both ways. His parents didn’t teach him that love doesn’t begin in the same place as affection or intimacy or violence. No stupid fucking Valentine’s gifts, no stupid fucking lengthy silences. Love exists in the spillage of blood from under blue veins and love exists in fingers stretching over fleshy hips and it’s individualism, it’s subconsciousness.

Dan turns on the street and fixes his hat backwards on his head with the phone and the sheet of paper. It’s raining, and people never notice anything.

No words wasted and no words lost.

“No, Dan, sunshine, wait—We can go together, I can come with you, I—” Phil’s voice starts to echo through Paris and heaven. “Don’t leave, baby, come back.”

Dan doesn’t believe in aliens and he’ll never believe in God and he realises he wants time to continue just as much as he never wants tomorrow to come around.

“ _If we shadows have offended._ ”

“Dan, please—Don’t leave me, I need you to stay—”

“ _Think but this, and all is mended._ ”

“—Dan, I-I’m sorry, I forgive you, I’m sorry—”

“ _That you have but slumber’d here._ ”

“—Stop walking, Dan, stop—”

“ _While these visions did appear._ ”

“—I shouldn’t have done it, okay, I shouldn’t h-have touched her and I shouldn’t have drank and—”

“ _And this weak and idle theme._ ”

“—And I shouldn’t have made you t-take shit and breathe shit and—”

“ _No more yielding but a dream._ ”

“—We can go back, baby, we can fix it—”

“ _Gentles, do not reprehend._ ”

“—Dan, listen to me, you can’t walk away, you can’t fucking—”

“ _If you pardon, we will mend._ ”

“—Fuck you for hurting me, fuck you for—I never fucking loved you—”

“ _And, as I am an honest Puck._ ”

“—You should have sold your book, I—I’m so sorry, baby, y-you should have sold it and made it and—I’m sorry about Christmas Eve, Dan, I didn’t—”

“ _If we have unlearned luck._ ”

“—I’ll take you h-home now, baby, we can go home right now and you can call your mom and you can—”

“ _Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue._ ”

“—Dan, she loves you, she always loved you, she didn’t mean to—Your mom, she forgives you—”

“ _We will make amends ere long._ ”

“—I’ll write you a poem, I’ll tell you a story, I’ll f-fix it with my words—”

“ _Else the Puck a liar call._ ”

“—C-Come home to me, come back soon, I lost a friend when I married you and—Grey, Dan, t-they’d be grey if I believed—”

“ _So, good night unto you all._ ”

“My aliens would be grey and my heaven would be you a-and bathtubs and sink water and Manchester Station and—All your favourite stories, baby, a-all the shit we smoked—”

“ _Give me your hands, if we be friends._ ”

“—I love you and I’m sorry—”

“ _And Robin shall restore amends._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aside from chapter thirteen, I think this is my favourite chapter. There are two left now by the way, and the fact that it still seems so far from the end is completely my intention. There’s no real way this story could end with every wish you have fulfilled. The art of the story is that nothing happens the way you want it to and everything is always just a little bit crooked. It could be better, it could be worse. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is my favourite Shakespeare play and there’s a lot of passages (as you can tell) that I realised I could manipulate into references to Teeth. I’ll obviously explain the links and shit at the end of the story, as I will everything, but I hope you liked it.
> 
> _Totus mundus agit histrionem._


	19. Stomach

**number nineteen: stomach**

_Dan_ Howell is sad and the streetlights are orange. It’s a matter of simplicity to begin with, something of falling rain and sketched-out synonyms for misery and grief. He’s the concrete of sidewalks and mattresses and his grandfather’s headstone, message ingrained into the fleshy texture of his brain. Somewhere, inside his skull. His mother planted irises at the grave but now there’s just weeds, overgrowing and tightening and suffocating and he can’t remember why he didn’t attend the goddamn fucking funeral.

Coked up, or some shit.

Drunk or high or fucking the man who was never taught how to pretend to give enough of a fuck.

Dan keeps walking, and he doesn’t care for where he ends up. There’s moisture from the rain brushed onto his eyelashes and his friend’s jacket is loose over his shoulders and there are bars lit up, music and glass-rim-touches between the floods of the present storm. Houses attached, skies low and empty. White lines down the roads, there are, lampposts like skinny arms and occasional cars over grimy puddles. It’s too quiet for Dan to feel anything but he feels the weight of the fucking earth and every galaxy it’s tried to entwine with on the back of his neck and spilling like shower-water down his shoulders. He thinks of nothing but himself and his bullshit attempts at being one step before intentions and one step behind attention and his self-concern glares like he’s trying too fucking hard.

Sometimes, he thinks, he doesn’t feel like he knows how to do anything but try too hard. Because he was raised by a pharmaceutical-addict stuffing coke and Prozac up the sleeves of the apron that made her look like a mother and a man with promises pouring down his chin that he left staining the carpet when he fucked off to find himself. Dan doesn’t know how to do anything but try too hard because he grew up in a house constructed of walls as thin as the skin covering his fingers and constructed of rooms too cramped to store bookshelves. Discarded copies of novels tossed around the floor and window ledges, sheets of paper from his journal torn out and stuck to plaster. He doesn’t know how to do anything but try too fucking hard because he woke up on weekdays to reminders on his bedroom walls, written in his blue handwriting and smudged around the edging of the lettering and _remember to remember you’re still breathing the same air._

Dan Howell’s childhood home worked hard through the night to make itself less of a home so that he’d stir to consciousness considering inking out the directions to the medicine cabinet on the back of his hand. So that he wouldn’t recognise his mother emptying closets for his father’s scent and cutting horizontal lines over her arms for the sound of his fucking name. He took her in the rough palms of his dirty hands and remoulded her so that her end was her beginning and they both felt a little like addiction and depression and knuckles to the side of hollow skulls, trying to empty themselves of still-lingering thoughts. But _remember to remember you’re still breathing the air_ , the lifted mattresses and crossed fingers and Dan wanted the clouds to move out of the way but his father stuck nails in his arms and hung in their place.

Then the storm passed and he never saw him again.

And he fucking hates him, but he fucking misses him. Fucking misses him for the good days, for the hope illustrated in cartoon strips around the pencil-thin shape of his lips and the CDs stacked in gloveboxes for the journeys away from home. His skin reeked of cigarette smoke that clung to the hems of his shirts and his breath was traced with alcohol but it didn’t smell like a corny catastrophe. Racking brains for memories of better days, racking shelves for hidden bottles and sterilised syringes and sometimes pain just has to be inflicted for the people who know nothing but how to strip you of satisfaction.

Sometimes Dan feels too much like his father.

Sometimes his heart feels too much like his adolescence.

And sometimes he wishes he could write himself back but the past built immaculate emotional barricades in the vacant areas and the busy areas and he doesn’t know when he loosened his grip but he can’t reach the fraying ends anymore.

He’s still walking down the street with the thunder on his back. The sheet of paper with Louis’ aliens drawn out as a messy sketch is soaked through with rainwater, crumbled in his fist, and he doesn’t think he even gives a shit that it’s ruined. He should, he knows, but he fucking doesn’t.

Too selfish to form sympathy.

Third person to feel less absorbed.

Sentences that start with connectives like he’s got to convince himself he isn’t as inconsiderate for everything but himself as it’s suspected he is.

Dan stops on the sidewalk because his feet don’t want to move. He’s too tired to formulate sequences of coding for action and he puts his face in his wet pyjama sleeve and tries not to cry. If he liked being lonely, he thinks, it wouldn’t be so fucking bad. And if he liked telling the truth, his ring would matter as much as his words and the world would matter as much as his husband and he’d make a slight bit of fucking sense because he’s so sick and so exhausted of never making any sense. But his cognition and his coherency have been slaughtered by his dependency on language and literature and marriage and sanity and anger and beauty and heroin-induced hysteria.

His life is so fucked up that the moments of consideration for the likelihood he’ll be okay mean fucking nothing because nothing will ever be okay again. There’s nobody walking the surface of the earth with the voice to convince him he’ll find a way to get better and all he wants is to feel something in the fucking havoc of his head. All he wants is Manchester station in the breeze of zero-nine and his teenage lover with his brother kicking footballs over curbs and running miles beside cars over speed bumps not good enough to slow distraction down. Manic depression falling like water between the fingers of rationality and _I’m so sorry I fucking hurt you, I’m so sorry I can’t control it._ And the thoughts just keep chugging like the counters just keep chipping under hands coated with blood and metaphors coated with guilt and there’s nothing to fucking regret if nobody cares enough about you to acknowledge the fact you tried to hurt them before you tried to hurt yourself.

Bars open on dismal Paris roads.

Red fingerprints, black jackets.

Good intentions but manipulated fates and a life ordered in photographic images taken by the north side of Dan’s brain. There’s little religion in the situation but God’s never fucking existed and if he has, if he does, he’s a prick not worth the time. So Dan tightens the clench of his jaw and hopes he chokes on the prayers he uttered in the services he wasn’t old enough to know he didn’t want to attend. The words are there under his tongue, tattooed onto the surface of his palate and they read _amen_ when they shone the torch light to check if he’d swallowed his pills.

“Hey! Hey, you! Kid!”

There are hands on Dan’s shoulders and then a girl before his face and she’s smiling even though she’s worn, not shivering even though she’s cold. Her clothes are tight around her skin and her breath moves through the air and she says, “I know you, I know ’ya. You were on the step, how’re things?”

Dan stares at her. She’s the girl from outside the café, the girl with the smashed phone and the girl with the aggressive friend and the girl he didn’t care enough to remember. No passages, no time. She’s working, he fucking knows, standing there on the corner. There’s cash stuffed into the waistband of her short attire.

“Where are your friends?” she speaks again. He doesn’t know her name because he doesn’t listen to fucking anything. “And your husband? Phil, ’ya said his name was Phil, yeah? You know, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been thinkin’ about your space pyjamas.”

“My space pyjamas,” Dan echoes, and pulls at his sleeve. The galaxies stretch like elastic bands tugged too far and he swears he sees Louis’ aliens in the crevices where the solar systems meet even though he doesn’t know what they look like. Planet after planet. Mind after mind. It’s a sequence, of sorts, but people never notice anything. “What about my space pyjamas, lady?”

“They made me think, kid, not much does,” she says. The ends of her hair and skin of her bare stomach are damp. “Hey, what’s ’ya name anyway?”

“Dan. I’m Dan,” he’s speaking over the scuttles of rain.

“Dan,” she smiles. “Bloody good to see you again, Dan. I’m Ally. You busy tonight?”

“No, Ally. I left my friends.”

“You left ’em? Left ’em where?”

“Out on the street,” Dan waves his hand through the air and catches the cool breeze in the movement. He brings it back before his face and stares at it clutched around the rumpled sheet of paper. There are cuts on the skin of his knuckles, chipped like ancient statues in the centres of capital cities. There are stretches of flesh and plotted blue lines and poison flooding as grief through his veins. Gushing out of his bloodstream as guilt tinged with greed for another fucking fuck-up, for another reason to drag his nails down his arms and crack his wrists until his bones ache and he’s walking around with _lost cause_ stamped to his pale forehead. “We saw a play, Ally, and I left them back there.”

“You hit that theatre up?” Ally asks. She’s got such a foreign light to her smile that somebody could use her eyes to navigate their way home. “Did ’ya? What did ’ya see?”

“Shakespeare,” Dan breathes. His pyjamas are soaked through. “It was good, Ally, he’s good. Phil’s favourite.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dan nods. “Phil’s favourite.”

He fucking hates the name in his mouth and he fucking hates its salty aftertaste and it all makes his skin prickle, all makes his hair stand. He puts his fingers between his lips to search for the syllables smeared over his gums and caught between his teeth and his skin’s coated with saliva when he takes them out again. Spit stringed with sadness and spluttered synonyms for _how fucking dare you do this to me_ and it’s Phil, it’s Phil, it’s only ever been fucking Phil. Evenings written in their poetry as sewing limbs together just to pluck the threads apart again and playing a shitty melody on every broken string, putting a line of lyrics to the sound of a love exhausted of its harmony. Dan can still fucking feel the rhythm of their breathing so synchronised and subtle behind the beat of a blank verse. Phil, Phil, Phil. He can still fucking feel the way he shook in his arms and clutched onto the bottle and sat up in the bed with sweat drenched over his back.

Moonshine behind windowpanes, jawlines against tousled hair.

Phil’s favourite.

Phil’s favourite.

Christmas Eve with the ambulance lights and the shovelled snow and the poetry spoken in the scratched voices of intoxicated men on rolling stretchers. Red and blue and vomit stained over white, addiction spoiled over romance. Smoke stung in blue eyes, rolls of the ocean like rolls of ecstasy and rolls of eyeballs and smoking shit just to pass the time. Phil’s shirt, Phil’s hands, Phil’s smile down the aisle between the pews and the stained glass and his mouth during early morning against the concealed bones of Dan’s hips. His lips sticky with cough syrup and his voice knotted with affection and Dan can’t remember anything but the taste of cool metal and hot breaths of liquor. Juxtapositions engraved into the touches of his fingertips around the mould of Phil’s skeleton sleeping restlessly under his flesh. Blue, brown. Heaven, hell. Faithfully faithless, chronically ironic and oxymoronic and a love claimed platonic in a monotonic voice. The shape of a collarbone, the curves of twenty four ribs and twenty four hours spent studying twenty four letters, minus ’o’ and ’k’.

“’Ya good, Dan?”

Dan blinks and Ally is watching him.

He says, ”Sick and sad,” and she says, ”That’s okay,” because somebody taught her how to once. Somebody taught her that broken people are not to be told the truth because their strength in the crooked places is defined by deception. Their strength is an accumulation of compassion and goodwill, but bullshit and fabrication breathe between the letters nevertheless. And Dan just wants to be told the fucking truth, that nothing determining his character is okay or alright and it’s not enough to try because it’s never been before. How can it be enough to pretend when it’s not even enough to believe and how can Dan trust the people who spit the _it’ll get better_ shit at him with their hands wrapped around hope if he’s only ever known hope to choke the honesty out of every situation and—

“I ain’t working no more tonight,” Ally is saying. She’s holding her arm above her head to shield her hair from the rain. “I can afford the last few hours off, what ’ya wanna do?”

Dan starts fiddling with the paper in his hand, the surface soaked and soft. He peels a corner back and sees the side of a sketch smudged and grey. Little blurs of orange running in its colour. “I don’t know, Ally. I left my friends.”

“Why’d ’ya do that, Dan?” Ally asks him, subdued.

“Lonely,” he utters, and runs his finger up over his hand. He sees it clutched around the collar bunched up at Phil’s throat when his eyelashes flutter. “I wanted to be lonely.”

“Why?”

“I love my friends and my friends aren’t happy when they’re with me.”

Ally frowns with water streaked over the makeup painted between the lines on her forehead. “I’m sure that ain’t true, kid.”

“It is. It is true, Ally, it is true.”

“You sure they knew you were walkin’ away?”

“They knew,” Dan says. “I told them, Ally, they knew. They let me go.”

Ally nods at him and lifts the inside of her shirt to her face, trying to dry the moisture. She trembles for a moment and looks like a canvas Van Gogh completed en plein air and forgot to retrieve before the storm. Dan doesn’t know what colour she is but she’s running and fading and peeling and streaming and he wishes he was good enough to fix her up with fresh brushes. He wishes he was good enough to finger-paint her back into place and he’d sign his name in the corner of her anatomy so everybody would consider him a fucking artist for mending the shit somebody else was supposed to.

They consider him an artist for mending the hearts of sad children scouring pages of shitty fiction for a release, a substitute, a reason to remain in the wreckage of wrong reckoning. But he’s not an artist for doing what another refused to. He’s not an artist for finding tissues to mop up blood and wipe eyes and he doesn’t want to be some fucking subject that people feel they have the right to. He doesn’t want to be some fucking idea that people feel they’re allowed to consider and he’s just a man working words because it’s all he knows how to do and all he knows how to use in the matter of taking prescriptions to cure what’s wrong in his head.

He doesn’t want to be a fucking narrator.

He doesn’t want to be a fucking husband.

In sickness and in health, Dan Howell just wants to be fucking happy.

And he swears to every God he doesn’t believe in that Ally sees it when she looks at him and finds him staring with clouds tossed over his pupils. He swears she sees it in the angular slouch of his posture and sees it the buttons fraying on his pyjamas and sees it in the cracks indented across his lips. Sees it in the dazed expression of confusion and sees it in the repetition that rolls off his tongue. Skinny limbs, scraggly hips, bible books cracked open and vodka poured over the hymns and—

“We should drink,” Ally says. _Amen, amen_. “I’m thinking we should drink, kid. You up for drinkin’?”

“I want to drink, Ally,” Dan tells her. “Phil likes to drink. He drank on Christmas Eve and I saw a green line in the hospital.”

“Your husband, Phil?”

“Yeah, Ally, my husband. He never told me about Noah’s Ark and I don’t ever want to see him again.”

“Will you?”

Dan watches her for a moment as the sky pours over her frame and then starts walking towards an open bar with its doors propped back like open borders into fucking war zones. Like the eyelids over his eyes and the sleeves over his wrists and he thinks maybe if he had somebody who gave a shit, he’d turn the other way. But he starts tearing at the thoughts in his head for anybody he loves enough to preserve his life for and the existing memories of previously existing lovers and friends and relatives all disintegrate and leave _let go_ ’s in their disillusioned passings.

So the inside of the bar is like the inside of his chest and he walks through it looking for something to cling to but every surface is too flat. He finds crosses to mark construction around a gaping area his heart should sit and he finds alcohol, finds salvation because the syrup is so sweet.

Ally follows him through, between the crowd and pulses of sound. He hasn’t been in a fucking bar since Phil Lester would hold him in the bathroom and kiss his bruised knuckles and write subliminal paragraphs on the subliminal thoughts he had about Dan’s tongue. 

“What ’ya want, kid?”

Dan drums his fingers against the bar and grinds his teeth to the sharp melody situated in his ears. Comforters clad in Phil’s scent, mint laced inside his mouth. His feet hanging over the end of the single bed and his knee pulled up to his stomach and his fingers trailing patterns over the front of Dan’s chest. Photo frames positioned at diagonals on dressers under windows beside packets of pills for the morning. Sheets of music found in pages of poetry and Phil’s hips beneath Dan’s and Phil’s hands around covers and fairy lights strung up between walls and black headboards.

Sunday afternoons.

Mugs of cooling coffee.

Hoodies and closed blinds and bookshelves and notepads and _I’m so fucking glad I met you, Dan, so fucking glad_. They’re getting tattoos in Manchester and Phil’s hand won’t stop shaking and they’re graffitiing classic literature with shittier attempts at genius. Living and breathing language, curling the edges of question marks with bewildered voices below ceiling arcs and fathers who don’t know where to start when queried about the kid too interested in depressants and too interested in boys. And skipping meals, skipping church, disappointment written and sealed and mailed to the doorsteps of childhood homes where mothers sit feeding codependent hearts with drags of _it’s okay, nothing will hurt in the morning_.

“Beer, Dan.”

Ally is holding two green bottles, and Dan thinks about Theo. He shouldn’t because it’s not the same, but he does. Thinks green and thinks aliens and thinks faith and thinks heaven.

And then he thinks Jesus and puts the bottle to his fucking lips.

_Amen._

“I ain’t ever been to a Shakespeare play, ’ya know?” Ally says. She’s fiddling with the beer’s label and Dan’s pondering over the taste of fresh heat in the back of his throat. “He don’t do much for me.”

“You don’t like Shakespeare, Ally?”

“Not a whole lot,” she admits, and shrugs. “He’s alright, I guess. Bit pretentious though, ain’t he?”

“Good, Ally,” Dan says. His hands are tight around his bottle. “Shakespeare is good. _Totus mundus agit histrionem._ ”

She draws her eyebrows together, lips ringed around the beer. “Sorry, what did you just say to me?”

“All the world’s a stage.”

“A stage?”

“A stage, Ally. Shakespeare made it so.”

Ally leans her face on her hand resting against the bar’s surface and continues peeling at the label. The cash is still peeking out of the top of her waistband. “He wrote a load of shit, kid, why’d ’ya like him? ’Cause Phil does?”

“No,” Dan says. He clutches the bottle when he feels his hand tremble and the beer soaks through his tongue again. There’s a clenching in his chest that communicates his craving for Phil’s compassion and the creativity constructed of the taste always lingering on his breath. Alcohol and addiction and medicine and rehab. The booze is flavoured with the days they sat on the stairs at the bottom of their apartment block and drank for the sunrise they weren’t sure was going to come. It’s flavoured with Phil’s anger, with a restless body through the premature hours of the mornings he didn’t make contact and didn’t bother to come home. With broken plaster and casts on hands and _you didn’t call back, you piece of shit, I thought you were fucking dead_.

Smashed phone screens and tempers working on thin air and Phil’s body pushed against Ella’s in a cramped fucking bar. His finger dragging over her bottom lip and touching at her gums and her breath catching his breath like she could decipher the feeling of his chest against her back if all he did was exhale. Like she’s cleaned the fucking blood from his shirt until her fingers were red raw and she’s held him as he shook from fear and withdrawals and she knows of the way his heart rate changes when the bottles aren’t opened. He fucked her and gave her his child but her head isn’t wired with the notes in the rule book for disorientation and waves of nausea and she’ll never fucking know what it feels like to consider the possibility that her lover will leave her in the dead of the night to put his face under the water and drown away his sorrows.

She’ll never fucking know what it feels like to be in love with Phil. Nobody else will ever fucking know and if they think they do, they don’t.

Because people don’t tie the harness tight enough to damage their organs.

“Dan, hey, Dan,” Ally has warm hands on Dan’s shoulders and Dan wants to tell her that she galaxies are bigger there and the aliens sleep peacefully there and he doesn’t fucking know what colour they’re supposed to be. “Slow down, kid, come on.”

She’s taken his bottle from his hands and put it down on the bar. Cold. Empty. His lips are sticky with beer.

“Don’t say that, Ally, don’t say it,” Dan is shaking his head and staring at the alcohol with Louis’ paper and Louis’ phone clutched too tight in his fists. He’s just like his fucking husband, he’s just like the fucking prick. Sick and sad and tired. A bloodstain is orange after you wash it three or four times.

“Say, what?”

“His name,” There are tremors in his voice. ”Please, I don’t want you to say his name.”

“Phil’s?”

Dan’s stomach lurches and he leans forward over the bar.

“I want some more of this,” he calls, drumming the bottom of his bottle against the bar. “More, Ally, I want some more.”

“Dan, I don’t—Just wait a little, yeah? Let me finish and then we can—”

“No, Ally,” he says, grinds his teeth again and continues drumming the bottle. His head starts working in successions of slanted rhymes that can be placed like couplets under the beat. “Now, I need it now. One more beer.”

One more beer.

Twenty four hours demanding one more beer with twenty four promises for the twenty fourth of December. Phil Lester got so pissed on the evening of their wedding that he vomited in the bathroom cubicle and stained the front of his suit. And Dan was marrying a man with a liquor problem he didn’t know then how to give a fuck about and they sat together on the cold tiles with their intentions tied up to conclusions like hearts tied up to life machines.

Ally gets him another beer and he fucking drinks it right there. He reminds himself of his father and the thought knocks him sick but he swallows it back down with swigs of cold liquid that taste like his husband and everything is fucking _fine._

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

Dan’s head moulds Ally as too nice for her own good even though he knows there’s probably shit she’s done and continues to do that contradict his judgement. She sits talking about her mother for a long time as Dan works his way through four bottles and learns that she was raised on disengagement and a malformed marriage. And he finds it so fucking ironic when she repeats to him that she’ll never marry because he’s got it in him to spit out, “It’s not so bad,” in the same voice he told his husband to go fuck himself.

His hypocrisy is a comedy sketch of the greatest goddamn quality and he’s a bastard to the trained eye like he’s a madman to the untrained. He’s alone in his company and cynical with obscenity and _honestly, you really just need to get the fuck over yourself._

Four beers and tipsy on delusional feet.

Music increasing pace and bass lines quivering through his ears and altering perspectives behind a cloudy gaze.

Ally says, “I ain’t feeling stayin’ here much longer, Dan. If you don’t wanna head back to wherever, ’ya can crash at my flat.”

He pulls his mouth from around his bottle top and breathes, “No, Ally, I’m not ready to stop yet.”

“Drinkin’? You can drink at my place, I won’t take shit from you. I ain’t your mother. Olivie’s out tonight, too. My friend. It’s all cool, kid.”

“Okay, Ally,” Dan says. Drinking, drinking, drinking. He’s thinking of the shit he’s done wrong and how much he wishes he knew how to make it leave him alone. But sad shit is good shit and bad shit is happy and Dan’s clinging to the earth like he’d cling to the ceiling, reciting the laws of gravity with his nails dug into the plaster.

Ally touches his hat and smiles. “I got K, Dan. Vodka and K.”

“Ketamine?” Dan echoes. His arms prickle under his pyjama sleeves. “You have ketamine, Ally, in your flat?”

“Sure, I do,” she nods and slides off the stool. “We can hit some up, ’ya can tell me about your shit. Shakespeare and marriage and poetry and I bet I’ll listen if I’m high. Come on.”

And Dan’s skin is fucking itching like there’s shit crawling over him when he pushes himself off his stool and his feet stagger across the wooden floor. There are men with their hands in the places they’re not wanted, moving and trespassing and the music would look like teenagers if Dan found a way to depict it onto paper. Would look like school textbooks and rolled cigarettes and girlfriends and boyfriends and Saturday jobs before shots and hard hangovers. And Dan can’t think about his youth without thinking about Phil and if he tries to erase him from the areas he’s present, his adolescence just looks like the surface of the moon with crevices indented over every stretch of grey. But less beautiful, less poetic. Without Phil, it’s empty of everything. No thrill or emotion or feeling or passion. No warmth or attraction or attention or attachment and Dan’s walking through a bar too many years after they danced to the racket of old pop classics and the strain of naive compulsion.

He’s walking through a bar with pyjamas on his back and aliens in his hand and fiction under his hair and if he was only granted another six words, his six words would be a question and the question would be _baby, how did we get here?_ Because there’s still music and still intimacy and still liquor and still drugs. And there’s still Dan, tasting like beer, and still Phil with his disappointment but everything is just so awful at pretending to be the same. There’s division and disconnection and oblivion and disparity. The people are strangers and Phil got a woman pregnant and Dan has fucking space pyjamas caked in sugar and vomit and adjectives printed over his bones. He has hair that reeks of rainwater and knuckles that bleed from the friction of undiagnosed bulimia and he can’t remember whether the decision to keep exercising his lungs was ever so goddamn difficult.

He knows no face and knows no home and he’s stumbling out onto the street with a girl frightened of commitment and stomach frightened of food. The storm is still there, cutting jagged lines through the sky like it’s trying to perform surgery and trying to mend broken shit that’s too beautiful to want to be fixed. Too grey, too heavy. The subject of ten thousand ballads and the narrator’s best friend and Van Gogh’s inspiration for when his imagination was drying up. Starry nights, better times, bigger problems and sadder men.

A car jitters down the road with an irregular engine and shitty metal on shitty wheels and Dan realises he could step right the way of its direction. He realises he could do it, like he realised he could tumble on the windowsill with Hélène and realised as a fifteen-year-old that there was nobody home to stop him taking his mother’s pills. And his life was never supposed to have been one dependant on irrationality and dependant on instability but he finds that it fucking is as he’s moving up the street with some girl waiting to get high after four beers have tickled at his throat. He finds that he could fucking kill himself and his head throws nothing at him when he asks it why he shouldn’t but he doesn’t know how to stop his feet from moving so he just keeps fucking going.

Headlights.

Cabinets.

Cords on too-tight dressing gowns and chairs to kick away with the fronts of bloody trainers and for eighteen fucking years, the only shit that kept him alive was the fact he couldn’t figure out the first line of his suicide note. And for a while after it was Phil Lester but it’s been too long since Phil Lester knew how to be anything but occupied space. He fucking forgot how to lift his hand to curl his fingers around Dan’s back when he was vomiting his energy out into the toilet. He fucking forgot how to hold him and touch him when he cried because he’d always be sitting with his back pressed against the refrigerator door and his heart clenched in the conflict of consideration. One more beer, one more beer, one more beer.

Dan’s tipsy and his head’s a wreck.

There’s a short distance between the sidewalk and the centre of the road and he hasn’t taken his pills for so long because nobody forced him to shove them down his throat. Nobody gives enough of a shit to count the capsules in the small bottle and find whether or not he’s taken too little or too much. Dan’s mother always said that he didn’t fucking need medication and he didn’t fucking need therapy and she flushed his strong prescription down the toilet before cancelling his sessions with his psychiatrist. And Dan’s fingers worked like a madman’s as the hours rolled through the night, scuttled past on the clock strung up on his wall above where he’d written _I hate you for driving my father away._

He carried drug addiction to her door in the name of retribution and smoked and snorted and swallowed and choked. He spat calculated rage and fury at his childhood and told her she fucking deserved every touch of metal to her wrist.

Down the street, there’s a church situated before the curve of the corner and Dan’s stomach starts lunging at the rolling roofs and the pointed spires.

Grey heaven with grey aliens.

Orange heaven with orange aliens.

The grass is greener on the other side and the gin is stronger on the chapel floor and Dan’s chest is contracting, his organs are fixed wrong. Incorrectly positioned and scattered around and pushed right in where they goddamn fucking fit. But he can’t put his fist in his mouth anymore because his head is overcrowded and his thoughts are coming down his throat and crawling down his windpipe and he hasn’t got the antidote to the poison of recollection. The poison of self-infliction and the poison of filthy antipathy and—

Ally’s flat is cold and empty. There’s clothes discarded over the floor and marks stained up the wall and the blinds are cracked in two, the windows blurred and obscured. The couch is littered with bags of shit, packed full with clothes and toiletries and necessities and Ally says, “They’re Olivie’s. She ain’t been livin’ here long now. She’ll move soon, too. No doubt. Nobody ever stays long in this shithole.”

Dan keeps his trainers on his feet and moves to sit down on the floor as Ally kneels down beside her refrigerator to retrieve her vodka bottles. And then she lays her cash out on this table scattered with unimportant bullshit and pulls up a bag that she rummages through. When she settles herself down at Dan’s side, she’s got two bottles and a bag of white powder and she cracks the vodka with a smile squared onto the slant of her lips.

Dan’s thinking of how many men have ran their fingers down her shoulder blades and slid their mouths over her ribs and how many times she’s made herself sick on the memory of their tongues. The memory of cool metal washing like blood down her throat and the memory of digesting chaos and calamity. Cash and clothes and sex and coke and the credibility of corruption like the capacity for consuming affliction. A call girl acquiring catalogs and channeling perspectives on beauty through the clouds of her common sense and the expectations she has of herself are manipulated by the influence of crude articles claiming women are unrefined in short clothes and low shirts with concealer concealing candour as it’s caked onto their character.

“What’s up with ’ya, kid?” Ally asks him.

Dan swallows his stream of assessment. Dirty flats and busy heads and narcotics and depression. “What?”

“Stop starin’, have a drink,” Ally pushes a bottle across the floor and Dan hooks his hand around its neck. “You think too much, I think. Anyone ever told ’ya?”

“Yeah, Ally,” Dan says. The vodka is hot and astringent and nothing and it spills right the way down his chin. Phil, Phil, Phil. “I think too much. Everyone thinks so. My husband liked . . . My husband liked vodka a lot.”

“Ain’t you ever gonna see him again, kid? What’d he do to you? Why’s it hurting so much?”

Dan drinks again and Phil’s there with his hair stuck to his forehead. Cold sweats, warm water, heaving and retching and touching delusion. A relationship with a hallucination and a fear of the silhouettes cast across pupils and existing in the corners of crazed corneas.

Another, another.

The vodka keeps flushing and keeps tasting like nothing but Dan’s chest burns with the intensity of a quarter of the fucking bottle. He kisses the distilled liquor when it touches his mouth and wets his gums and he doesn’t remember his own limits for all it’s fucking worth so he drinks some more and ignores his discolouring sobriety.

Grey, grey, grey.

“Phil—” Dan slurs with an emotional intoxication. “Phil was a writer, Ally, he was gonna be so famous. So famous and I was so fucking proud.”

“Gonna be?” Ally’s drinking too. “What happened, Dan, why’d he not?”

“He was, he was, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t—Ally, he didn’t want it when he had it. He was so good and he didn’t want it.”

“What did he do?”

“He sold his book and didn’t write another and then he closed his eyes and clenched his fists and said no more words. I was there when he said, “No more words.” No more words, Ally, they made him so sad and made everyone else so happy. He liked vodka because he liked poetry but he didn’t like how it made him feel.”

“Poetry,” Ally mumbles. She slurs the closing syllable. “Did he drink too much, kid?”

“Yeah, Ally, he—I didn’t like it when he drank. I saw him in the hospital on Christmas Eve and he had a green line and pretty words to write but he didn’t wanna do it no more, he didn’t wanna be here no more. I cried and I cried and he rhymed me words about the vending machines and the little bumps and tiny fingers in the maternity . . . maternity wards. He whispered about institutions, Ally, white and flowers and clinics and they flushed his blood with fresh fluids and head with help, help, help.”

“Did he love you, Dan? Does he love you?”

Tight mouths, pressed lips. The vodka sears and cries and bleeds and Dan’s in his twentieth year with his limbs twisting around self-doubt and his heart twisting around his lover’s liver, fucked with liquor and dependency. They’re in love with their spines against the bricks of the tattoo parlour and they’re in love with their feet in the soles of their shoes in the middle of Manchester Station. They’re in love on the dance floor in their wedding ceremony in their suits with The Beatles and the pretty sounds and the friends and _congratulations._

The music, the moment, the forgotten and the noticed.

“My lord, I shall reply amazedly.”

The shots.

The collars.

The church.

The white.

The Beatles like the beetles we keep in the boxes and—

“ _Half sleep, half waking: but as yet, I swear_.”

“Dan, I ain’t ever been in love. Those feelings don’t work with me. My soul’s too fuckin’ damaged to know how to entwine with another.”

“You don’t wish you were in love, Ally,” Dan’s vision is hazy and there’s amusement sloshy in his voice. “You don’t wish, goddamn, you don’t wish. I wanted to—A writer, Ally, I wanted to be a writer, too. I wanted to be famous, too. I was gonna be good and I was gonna be happy and— _I cannot truly say how I came here._ ”

He laughs at his mimicry and its soggy with incoherency and Ally doesn’t get it because Ally doesn’t get him. Like Phil doesn’t get him and his mother didn’t get him and she didn’t get his fucking letter either.

“My mom never wrote me back,” he slurs to her. Sending from Manchester. “My brother never called me back and my dad never came back and my friends . . . my friends made me happy, Ally, but I—I made them all so sad. Grey and black and blue. What colour are your aliens, Ally?”

“Aliens?” Ally repeats. She’s drinking but she’s slower and Dan’s halfway into his bottle. The alcohol is tasteless around his teeth. “I don’t know, Dan.”

“You—” he compresses a heave of emotion. The vodka rises in his throat. “You don’t believe, Ally, you don’t believe in aliens.”

“I do,” she says. “Don’t know their bloody colour but I fuckin’ believe. Like believin’ in God and not knowing his face.”

“You believe in God,” Dan states. He wipes his mouth on his pyjamas and thinks about identity. Thinks about Louis and thinks about the paper sitting next to him on the carpet.

He takes his hat off his head.

“No. I don’t. Do you?”

“No, Ally. No God, no, he—He’s not here. We’re dying and he’s not here and—” he laughs again. “The mice will play while the cat’s away. I left my friends. Can you—I want to breathe.”

He’s holding his bottle again and Ally’s tearing back the K. A bag of powder and a reason to inhale and a fucking mentality in fucking pieces. Questions of sanity and stability and sadness. Sickness and sweeteners and _spit out spoken-word like a synonym for salvation_. Serotonin spilling out of slashed wrists and scolded skin and smudging on skinny arms under sleeves of space pyjamas. Bleak voices crying out for a reason to stay alive and ghosts on deserted islands with nails in their hands. Octaves lost over ocean fronts, responses distant in the blank space between heaven and earth.

The mice will play while the cat’s away.

Ally’s got rolled paper and a line of ketamine and it’s coloured and contained in his heavy inhale. White, addicts, powder. He’s cold and calculated and he wraps his mouth back around his bottle after snorting the fucking drug. It’s tickling at his nostrils and is an avalanche down his throat and his cells prick to attention, his system stirs with stimulation. Machines that buzz and blur and beep and bedsheets sticky with sweat, blouses drenched in obsession. The barricades of emotional detachment built around his brain crumble and collapse for the ketamine to chug through and his hands are fucking shaking as he manipulates connectives to connect distortion with the drug’s distinction.

His heart’s plucking chords on the strings of his arteries that sound like melodies made of _K_. Two letters tattooed on the insides of his wrists, two omicrons present in the title of the revelation and two thousand fucking minds he knows didn’t realise. He’s speaking with _K_ and regurgitating it up, wondering how subtlety can influence such artistry. He’s fine and okay, okay and alright and his divorce has been suffocating under the mask of a marriage for nineteen fucking passages but it’s still breathing fine. Everything is spinning and shaking and changing and Dan holds onto his body like he’s falling apart.

Dissociative anaesthetic.

The drug breathed in hard and the letter on Dan’s arms and Ally takes her own line and leans back against the couch.

Numbness.

Disconnection.

“Fuck, Dan, I’ll get us another,” she’s saying. Not enough, not enough. “Why the hell ’ya got—What’s that drawing there?”

Dan’s hands slide over the flooring in search of Louis’ aliens and he sees them moving but he can’t fucking feel it. He’s eighteen and Phil’s suggesting shit and he doesn’t want to do it but he loves him and it feels so fucking great to make him feel so fucking great. He takes another line right after Ally separates it out and it’s a sequence, of sorts, the order of the next hour.

Over and over and over.

Sick and sired and tired and high on the floor of a flat he doesn’t fucking know. Ally’s mumbling shit such a distance away about the way her father didn’t treat her right and the way her mother should have coughed up the cash and Dan doesn’t get it but he doesn’t have to because he wouldn’t be able to help her anyway. Like he was never able to help his brother when the cupboards slammed and he cried through rejection and he was never able to help himself when the lights came on and there was nobody there.

He didn’t know how to help himself when the lights came on and there was nobody there.

He’s in worn trainers outside the school gates and writing messages to his neighbours with his finger through the snow on the windscreens and the windows. He’s exercising his right to smoke away his life and not give a shit what anybody thinks of him because giving a shit just equals disappointment. Equals teachers with expectations and parents with paranoia and everybody longs for, everybody demands. Self-consciousness and dazed delirium and fucking euphoria in the shadows of sorrow. Disheartened kids writing _depression and shit_ on websites and textbooks without feeling fuck all and Dan’s tried so hard to be what he isn’t that what he isn’t is what he is.

There are changes in the structure of the flat’s dirty living room because there are changes in the structure of Dan’s brain. He’s high off his face and he’s taken too much and he’s holding his head between clutches of the couch because he’ll fall off the planet if he doesn’t. The galaxies are bigger on his shoulders and the aliens sleep peacefully there.

“Ally,” he’s slurring. “I need the phone.”

She echoes it back and he says, “The phone, Ally, t-the _phone._ ”

He left it on the floor but it isn’t there anymore. Or it is but he doesn’t know and he’s frightened of the situation. It’s been years since the twenty-something when he took more than he should and Phil Lester was—

Ally’s pushing something into his hand and he holds it close enough to know it’s the phone. Screens and keypads and Louis and orange. He’s thinking about them on the street and thinking about what he was told to do and he starts tapping his thumbs on icons and letters and trying to reach somebody who cares. Hélène is occupying the delusion in his brain because she’s considerate for him or some shit, because she was there when they weren’t and she didn’t bother to exaggerate reality and she’s never too little when she’s supposed to be too much. She’s trying and breathing and living and existing and Dan likes Ally, he does, but he fucking wishes she was Hélène. Because they’d keep taking ketamine and keep falling deeper and she’d suggest a fucking poem or find a goddamn TV set to play a cartoon. She’d be interested in Shakespeare and the way Dan’s head works under the influence and she wouldn’t pretend she knew where home was just to make him feel better. She wouldn’t speak about it getting better because she knows it well enough to know it doesn’t and Dan misses her already, in the same way he misses Louis.

Red and black and orange.

Smoking on windowsills and sitting on curbs and a man laying beaten in the hallway of a hotel with floral patterns printed over its walls.

A tortured poetic soul, she said.

Speaking like he wrote the world the way it is, she said.

Good enough, she said.

Calm down, she said.

Violent winds and early mornings and stories whispered between rushes of water, she said.

Red and black and something different, something a man with ketamine in his system can’t rid his head of. And Dan’s thinking in his disorientation about the poems he’ll write for the way he’ll miss her when he types out his words and hopes he presses them to send.

_i am sorry i am sorrry i am nevr comng home._

Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy.

He doesn’t know if she’ll ever get the message. And if she does, if she’ll understand. And if another does, if they will.

Dan gets up from where’s slumped and watches his trainers move over the floor. Ally’s voice is distancing with his decreasing state of mind and his developing loss of coordination and he feels the earth changing direction, feels the sun setting in the east. But it comes up in the north and shifts itself to the south and it rains in the west and snows between the two and the sky continues to storm over the frames of Paris. Dan’s a drunk man and a high man and there’s poison in his memory, bleeding out of his ears and choking in his throat and he’s staggering and stumbling and tired of trying so hard.

He sees men with torn skin and shadows like spilled ink. He sees a mattress on the floor with needles scattered around and sees his fun while it lasted, sees his mood plummet and hang so low and so frightening because the mania is wearing away.

“I think my head’s rotting,” he slurs because Ally might still be there. Or maybe she’s dead and maybe he is too and maybe his heaven is the place his feet are shuffling right now. Maybe their hell is each other, their states won’t get better. What is is what is now and what is now is what will be. “It feels like my head’s rotting, i-it’s fucking rotting and—I’m dying, I am, I’m dying.”

The fucking bathroom is fucking filthy and fucking dark and fucking cold. There’s _infidelity_ written across the wall in marker that runs and smudges at the edges. Dan’s fingers cling to the ceramic sides of the sink as he works through the tension in his tissues and his muscles and he sees Phil in the mirror with his hair combed back from his face. Standing behind him, flowers stuffed up the cuffs of his blazer and his collar folded down neatly with a half-smile positioned on his face. His cheeks are uplifted with the expression and his lips are red and damp and there’s no cracks or no flaws or no faults in the illusion.

Dan breathes, “Phil,” with his attention smeared over the mirror and sees the man behind him bring his hand to run over his hair. Young and good-hearted and gentle and in love. Careful at each corner, smoothed at every surface.

“Baby, there’s so many people,” he says. He’s smiling and he’s happy. “How nice is it to know they give a shit? You’re fucking gorgeous, I love you. I can’t believe you haven’t left yet.”

“Left?” Dan whispers. It’s strained and wrenched but hazed over by his delirious head. His cuckoo concussions, his tallies of casualties.

His prisoners exercising.

“Yeah, left, left me. Walked out on it all, you know, it’s a big deal getting married and—” Phil puffs out a breath through his lips and his smile returns with the fault of insecurity. “You’re still here, waiting. I didn’t expect you to be. It’s still terrifying how wonderful you are and you don’t even have to try.”

“I won’t leave,” Dan manages. His shoulders are slouched and his words are just bullshit and _come home to me, come back soon, I lost a friend when I married you._ “I won’t, Phil, I—I’m sorry. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Phil says, soft. “You’re okay, we’re okay. Your mother couldn’t make it, but you’re okay. We’re getting married, baby, we’re—We’re gonna do so good. You’re the greatest person I’ve ever met and this is is the best fucking day of my life.”

There’s a vile taste in the back of Dan’s throat but he’s smiling and breathing and the drug is rolling. “Best day of my life,” he slurs. “Best day.”

Phil watches him with his blue eyes that make Dan’s hell its own fucking heaven. “Are you ready, sunshine?”

Dan’s grip is loose on the sink and he drops his hands and turns on his heels and—

Phil’s not there in his suit with his smile. He’s not there with his serenity and not there with his endearment but he’s there on the tiles up the wall in a grey shirt. Shaking, convulsing. He’s crying and mumbling and he hasn’t drank for three days and Dan’s staggering over the distance to kneel at his side. There’s no time that passes but there’s clocks that tick and he holds a scraggly Phil in his arms like he’s trying to keep him afloat. Oceans of gin, broken and shipwrecked.

Eat your fucking words.

“Phil,” he’s saying. Cold and scared and _sorry_. “Phil, please, I—Phil.”

Phil’s got weak hands hooked around his waist and his face slumped against his neck. He’s whining and whimpering and his liver’s craving a drink but Dan knows not to fucking give it him like he knows not to fucking leave him.

He says, “Phil, sit up—Phil, y-you have to—Phil.”

“I’m sorry,” Phil tightens his fingers around his pyjamas and sobs his name. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt you, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Phil—”

“L-Leave me alone now—Dan, you—You gotta leave me alone now—”

“No, Phil,” Dan’s sliding his hands over the broken parts and trying to smear loyalty but loyalty never worked for them because it never worked for anyone. There’s anger and alcohol and defeat and resignation and Dan picks and Dan pulls but Phil pushes him away. Lukewarm coffee, bloody noses.

Dan’s on his hands and knees and rubbing the phantasms from his eyes. Phil’s not there suffering withdrawals but he’s pacing metres up the room in a hoodie and skinny jeans and he’s got rage etched onto his face.

Red for the blood splashed up the wall and red for his knuckles pushing agony into throats.

“I don’t need you to stand up for me, I can fucking stand up for myself,” he spits, reaching down and fisting Dan’s shirt. “Fuck you, I was fine and you had to come and interfere with your bullshit and—”

“Get off the floor,” Another Phil to Dan’s right, standing like he did right back in number one when the sky was milk and he’d fucked somebody else. And Dan’s hallucinating his husband in the moments he was happy and the moments he was sad and he’s sitting in the middle of Ally’s bathroom shaking and crying.

He took too much.

He said too much.

His vision is blurry and his lungs are giving out and—

“Get off the fucking _floor_.”

“Stop,” Dan sobs. He looks down and Louis’ paper is tight in his fist and he forces his knees over the floor to reach the sink. He heaves himself high to stuff the drawing up the faucet and he doesn’t touch the tap but the water rushes out, bleeding orange over the drain and soaking Louis’ aliens. Destroying the paper and ruining the sketch.

“N-No—” Dan tries to snatch it from the water but his fingers can’t grasp the soggy edges and there’s an arm around his waist, a Phil against his back.

“Shh, baby, shh,” he’s hushing quietude into Dan’s ear. Sounds eighteen, sounds gentle. Happy and calm and sheltered and sober. “Don’t cry now, come on. Why are you crying?”

“P-Phil, I—Please, don’t touch me, I don’t want you to touch—”

“Dan, listen to this,” Phil in a coloured shirt with tousled hair from pillow-friction is standing with drafted work in his hands when Dan turns around again. “I don’t know how it sounds, it’s not too long of an extract but just— _They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. And they say_ —”

“I don’t want to want this. Do you think I fucking want to want this?” The other side of the room. Phil’s fist is in the wall.

“— _eats nothing because it does the same, say his insides are coated instead with the black ink passed on from the moments his tongue has touched the end of his pen_ —”

“Stop it, stop it,” Dan threads his fingers through his hair, dampened by his sweat and pulls at the strands. Angry Phil and happy Phil and crying Phil and laughing Phil. Manchester Phil and London Phil. The sounds are dancing through the room and Dan’s head is on his shoulders. The galaxies are bigger. “Shut up, Phil—Go away, please go away—”

By the door in his wedding suit.

On the floor in his grey shirt.

At Dan’s back with his soft voice and in the centre with his milky voice and beside the wall with his angry fists.

Reading his story over the volume to the rhythm of Dan’s irregular chest.

Dan pleads for the noise to die down and trembles when he’s touched. There’s red when his shirt is pulled and blue when Phil cries his name and yellow runs down over the empty bathroom tiles. There’s a mug in the sink and water gushes out of the tap and the glass of the mirror shatters and cracks and his knees collide against the floor.

Waves of nausea.

“Why don’t you ever fucking _listen_ to me?”

Tides of addiction.

“Follow the yellow brick road—”

Breezes of isolation.

“Noah’s Ark was afloat for one hundred and fifty days—”

A punch in the gut.

“I love you, I love you, I love you—”

A kick in the teeth.

“I’ll dance with you, baby, come dance with me—” Phil’s laughing and trying to thread their fingers. “Get up, Dan, come and dance.”

Shifting shower curtains.

The Beatles and pretty sounds.

A Phil Dan doesn’t know with his hands wrapping blue sheets around a small child.

Little bumps and tiny fingers.

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.”

“Love you.”

Dan curls up on the floor and brings his knees to his chest and screams with his hands twisting through his hair.

He doesn’t remember who he is and doesn’t remember who he was supposed to be and he took so much more than his fucked head could handle. He lost his ring in a puddle and never found the colour of his aliens and he doesn’t stop screaming when the sounds die and the bathroom rids itself of every fucking illusion. Empties of happy and empties of sad and empties of good shit and empties of bad shit and Dan doesn’t know how to help himself when the lights come on and there’s nobody there.

His throat tightens and burns and his scream dies out.

His jaw clenches under his tears.

He brushes his sleeve over his face and sits up on the tiles and the paper stuffed up the faucet is rumpled but dry like Dan’s still fucking high but not hallucinating his life.

There’s no yellow down the bare walls, no crack through the fixed mirror.

They say Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because it made him happy. And they say Dan Howell eats nothing because it does the same, say his insides are coated instead with the black ink passed on from the moments his tongue has touched the end of his pen. Coated with red from the moments his heart has bled like its been slashed right down the middle with a steak knife under a shaking hand. And it makes a sort-of black-red, a sort-of pseudo blood. All over his lungs and his stomach and his gut. Scattered around, pushed right in where they fit.

Nothing may ever be again.

But until death it is all life and until heaven it is all hell and Dan sits there with crossed legs and dilated pupils and his space pyjamas hanging half off of his shoulder.

Come hell or high water.

Come good days, come bad.

He visited Paris and found Louis and found Hélène and found Ally. And Theo and heaven and Shakespeare and hope. Escobar, Orion, Christmas Eve and crushed sunflowers and the narration fades out with emptiness and solitude. 

Dan’s eyes stream but posture remains still and his chest moves to keep up with the rate of his agony. He scrawls a plan in his insanity to find his way to Arles and buy a new pack of pens and find a God he doesn’t believe in to pray for his lover and pray for the friends he left behind.

He’s tired and he’s lonely and he’s at eternity’s gate.

Sending from Manchester.

Sending from London.

Sending from Paris.

Acute mania with generalised delirium.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I’m severely sleep deprived and feeling very emotional and this chapter is under my skin. I’ve got one left, but this is probably the most important for reasons that’ll be obvious later. Also, the closing bathroom scene might be the best thing I’ve written for this fic. It’s a complete analysis of Dan’s character and story and I think it’s pretty good at channeling the sequence of emotions felt from the beginning of the plot to the end. Anyway when this story is over, maybe I’ll actually be able to catch up on sleep and think a little less. The final chapter will be up as soon as it can be. Let me know what you thought of this, though. Thanks!


	20. Okay

**number twenty: okay**

December 24, 2009.

Dear Mom,

I’m a product of the product of the mess you didn’t mean to create. I’ve struggled for a while with beginning, just the general concept of genesis and I guess for as long as I can remember, I haven’t known how to approach it. It’s virtually impossible to approach somebody else with something you don’t even know how to approach yourself, too. This isn’t an apology for my self-reflective nature but, God, my lack of communication was and always will be the consequence of trying to understand myself.

Objectively, my beginning begins with you and Dad. It begins with the first time he decided to bring a packet of cigarettes up to your front porch with a lighter in the pocket of his blue jeans and the first time he touched his thumb into that space between your fore and middle finger. The first time he taught you how the muscles moved around the shape of his spine and the first time you couldn’t leave your mattress after he called you because you’d been working the disaster of your relationship between the slats of your bed since he’d spat at you that you should sleep on it.

First this, first that. I begin in every place you begin because you always were and always will be my beginning. But subconsciously, Mom, I don’t know who I am. It’s hard to explain. Everything that’s everything just feels like nothing and I try so hard to make it into something but it’s always something I don’t understand. My present is my past because I think about it so much and my past is far away, off screen at a distance I find so hard to reach. I’m lost, in some state of vacancy. Since Dad left, it’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s troubled me, Mom, it’s bothered me. Played on my mind. I’ve found that being happy once is worse than never being because there’s an element of torture within it, an element that defeats the point but I’ve never really known a happiness I haven’t used to hurt myself.

I don’t know if you feel the same. You and I and the concept of relation is difficult, I know it is. I wanted to write to tell you that the moments of my adolescence I spent ignoring you were entertained with thoughts of what I would say if I knew how. When you asked me if I believed in God, the way the door hinges splintered back against the wood wasn’t synonymous with doubt or disbelief. It wasn’t even synonymous with my fury at your nerve to propose the question in the same voice you’d asked for more pills and you’d told your fucking shrink that you’d cut a line from your elbow to your wrist because it was the only consistency you felt you had. I wasn’t angry, Mom, I wasn’t skeptical. I slammed the door and spat shit about the family’s evangelicalism because I didn’t know how to tell you how much it hurt me to know you didn’t consider believing in me before believing in somebody else. And I’d struggled for so long with painting myself half of what this Jesus was to you, half of what he stood for and lived for and died for that your rejection of my effort just concluded in articulated atheism.

I don’t blame you for not settling your faith in me, and I’m sorry for using your religion against you. I find it easier to write that down. I didn’t intend for this to be an apology but you can always find something if you look close enough, I guess. Aliens in the craters of the moon, and all that. There are things I have to apologise for, things I see when I cast my attention over the state we were in. God, what a state we were in. I spent so much time trying to convince myself that there was something other than separation written as a solution to the problem but there’s never anything outside of guilt laying on the first step to reconnection. And I apologise for not realising my apology would have provoked yours, in the same way I apologise for not stressing enough how much your happiness was important.

Because your happiness was so important.

In the situation with Dad, it was so important. Equally important, from a general perspective, but more from mine because I’ve valued my relationship with you over my relationship with him since he left you with two kids and a cabinet of antidepressants. Since he split, since he ran, since I came to conclusion that his promise to come back was only a promise for the three minutes I stood at the door with him, pleading with him not to leave at four in the morning. Sometimes I consider the likelihood of knowing at the age I was that he wasn’t going to return. That the reason I noticed the curl of his fingers around the side of the door was because I knew it would be the last time. Not entirely because he’d never come to touch the front door again, but because I’d never let him.

I’m not even sure I miss him, Mom. I did, once. I used to everyday. And there are times when I’m so sad that I can’t even pick my eyes up from the floor and my ribs feel like they’re tightening around the organs packed inside my chest and he’ll be all I can think about, all I want. I’ve heard a thousand times in a thousand different voices that he wasn’t a good person, that he was selfish and he was vindictive and he left because he didn’t care enough to stay. He caused so much pain, tried to recreate the person he’d created of me and nothing will ever be the same again, I know that. But I measure my heartache with my feelings towards him each moment that scuttles by and I find that I’m my worst when I’m yearning to hear his voice. I don’t doubt the fact that he fucked up, that he mended your broken pieces just to shatter them again and I don’t doubt the fact that you fucking hate him for it. I don’t doubt the fact that I do, too. It’s strange, though, when you think about it. Sometimes people leave because they’re just tired of seeing the people they care about hurting and knowing there’s nobody to blame but themselves and nothing is black and white, Mom, I don’t believe that.

When he left, everything changed. You made it like he’d died because maybe it was easier on your head to convince yourself he was never coming back, but it wasn’t easier on your wrists. I’m sorry for the shit I spat at you when I returned home from school and found you juggling pills and wine and debt. I’ve been trying to understand addiction lately and trying to understand that it doesn’t define you, even though it so often feels that way. It doesn’t have to determine the good as well as the bad, the bad as well as the good. All in all, I don’t think I’m addicted to anything and it’s difficult for me to enunciate what it feels like because I’ve never scratched the surface with it myself. But your addiction to the shit that made you forget my father was addicted to the shit that made him forget you is an addiction I can try to interpret in my hazy state of ignorance. When I found you at the table, I was drawing disgusting words from the aching areas of my chest and firing them like bullets at everything you’d constructed for yourself but were already starting to tear down. And I was wrong because I manipulated the situation to make it seem like I was helping you when all I did was hurt you, Mom, and I can’t even claim I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry for the anger his fucking retreat instilled within me. I can’t blame him for the mistakes I made but I can blame him for realising too late that everything I do has a consequence.

I think maybe he’d benefit from a lesson on that too, but whether or not I’d want anybody to get close to him after the fires he started of our fragility is something else entirely. People don’t deserve to be treated the way we were, but I don’t think people deserve to be treated the way he was either. Again, not black and white. My inability to do anything but think competently is the reason I see the grey. It comes between right and wrong, comes between good and bad.

Since moving away, you know, I’ve been taking the meds. You never liked them, it drove you so fucking crazy to see me with them on my tongue. You said they’d made a hell of your heaven and they’d do the same to me but I don’t have a heaven to give a hell to, Mom, I don’t. It must be hard for you to hear that and I don’t want to hurt you anymore, but I can’t afford to lie to you after everything that’s happened. The pills keep my head above the water, keep my feet on the ground. I’m not addicted to shit, but they alleviate the pain and act like some sort of preservation from the infliction of the world. I’m sorry it’s harder for you to find your salvation with your agony and your bipolar. I don’t know if you remember the night you dropped so fucking low that you took too many of my antidepressants after drinking the bottles empty and spent my savings for college on a shopping spree, before trying to kill yourself in the bathroom.

You used water and cords and razors that Dad had pushed against his face before the evenings he spent with you. Did it make you feel closer to him? The pair of you, sixteen, the back of his van with his breath in your lungs and did he write you your language before you knew how to speak? I’ve lived for almost half my fucking life waking with an anger tight on my chest, thick and sticky between my ribs and it’s only ever been directed at the wrong people because the right person was never around. Whilst Dad was away trying to convince himself that alcohol was the antidote to the words he didn’t want to hear—using metaphors of Van Gogh hearing apologies different after he cut his ear off—I was spewing venom towards your efforts to be something you’d never had to be before.

You raised Adrian and I on a stomach digesting pharmaceuticals and a heart digesting the disaster of your marriage to our father and you got up and you tried. Hell, you tried. I don’t know what the fuck kind-of person I was to not account for how much I didn’t realise I valued that before I burned the fucking bridges you’d built between my trauma and my recovery. I lost so much of you that I just didn’t feel like I was screaming at my mother anymore and I kept waiting for the guilt to strike me over the head, but no blow ever came. So I never stopped trying to hurt you because I had a brain that conjured nightmares in which you’d never stop trying to hurt me and the only way out of it all was to follow the path ignited by the light from the fires I’d started to satisfy my craving for an answer to the question of where the fuck I was heading.

I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, Mom, I know that now. And I know you never intended for Adrian to find you in the bathroom drowning under the weight of prescription-pill-addiction and a lack of direction I relate to so emphatically but it feels like everything that happened, happened because you’d prayed for it not to. Since that night, I’ve longed for the chance to return to the days before your suicide attempt hung quietly in the corners of our home so I could stick a printed list of ‘everything you shouldn’t do if your mother tries to kill herself’ onto the refrigerator door. The kind-of fucking opportunity an education doesn’t offer. And I’m sorry you felt so fucking awful that you had to push your head under the water, but he was my baby brother and he found you and no kid deserves to be forced to calculate the probability that his friends at school will consider his mother’s death his fault. No kid deserves a heart that sings out accusations of ‘murderer’ and a brother who doesn’t yet know the words to teach him the ways in which sometimes there’s nobody to blame for a person who hurts on purpose.

In which the only accident is the strength and the distance from the scene to the phone, the distance between the three buttons and the distance from the door to the bathroom.

Those few days you lost custody of Adrian were the hardest, when I think back. They’re emphasised, defined by solitude and emptiness as if somebody had reached right in and used their fingers to scoop the distilled faith out of the hopelessness. There was such silence, such secularity. I remember not knowing how to ask you in the disquietude if you were doubting your belief in God, or if you were just frightened he was doubting his belief in you. I sat around in the hospital ward, waiting for grandma to show on behalf of the voicemail I’d left informing her of your state but she never did. Maybe there was more to it than the simple fact of not wanting to see you and maybe I should have tried harder to determine the reasons, but I was so fucking tired and so fucking weary. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to know what to do or not and the mental exertion produced by the loneliness was consuming every ounce of my sense.

Before Adrian left, he asked me if you were dying. And I struggled to understand how I hadn’t considered it in the previous hours of your unconsciousness, but I hadn’t. I figured there wasn’t a code written out in my head for confronting your death because the emotions entwined with it weren’t ones I knew how to associate with your name. I told him that you weren’t, and that you wouldn’t, because somebody taught me that broken people are not to be told the truth. Somebody taught me that their strength in the crooked places is defined by deception. Compassion and goodwill, but bullshit and fabrication nevertheless.

I told him that I knew you’d be okay, both because you always were and because you didn’t know how to be anything else. I spent the rest of your stay in the ward sitting outside your room, jotting memorised quotes and old song lyrics down on the sheets of my notebook. I wrote them down in red pen and tried to formulate some sort-of plan of action for when you finally woke up. And your name was inked down a thousand times in my handwriting, but it didn’t make you feel anymore like my mother. It didn’t make me feel any fucking closer to you, not even when I thought about calling Dad and started crying and the red ran down the page like pseudo-blood.

I vomited then in the bathroom cubicle and sat on the dirty floor with an empty stomach and a heavy chest. I was sixteen, and you were dying. And I’d always hated the fucking hospital, ever since I was a kid and Dad carried me there at two in the morning in space pyjamas and worn trainers because I was so sick.

I waited a while longer for you, thinking and writing and thinking. I don’t recall ever mentioning this before, but I didn’t leave at all during your stay. I couldn’t. I had nothing to fucking leave for and, granted, nothing much to remain for either but I’d filled so many pages with your name that it had become a reason in itself. Then you woke, and I was fucking screaming at you before you could even process the question of whether you remembered anything at all. You’d fucked up and they’d taken Adrian and I’d been stuck out in the waiting room for days on end.

But I didn’t listen to you, and I get that now. I’d spent so long soaked in self-pity that it never even crossed my mind to think about what you were thinking about when you’d attempted to end your life. I tried tearing the pages from my notebook but there were so fucking many of them that I just threw the thing away and never saw it again. Memorised quotes, old song lyrics.

I remember scribbling down this passage from _Don Quixote_ :

“Support life, which is of more consequence to thee than to me, and leave me to die under the pain of my thoughts and pressure of my misfortunes. This thought blunts my teeth, paralyses my jaws, cramps my hands, and robs me of all appetite for food; so much so that I have a mind to let myself die of hunger, the cruelest death of all deaths.”

I’ve been trying to figure out why I chose that one for a while now. I don’t know if it’s because you said it was your favourite, or if you picked it out and explained it to me when we’d read it together years ago. All those times you were sad, all those times I curled your hair around the shape of my finger and peeked from behind the slant of the book’s surface to smile at you. I miss it being hard to admit that I miss you because it isn’t anymore and I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all.

Nostalgia’s such a strange thing. It haunts me. I’ve written a lot about it, tried to understand it in the same way I have addiction. It clouds everything over, plucks the bad shit from the good shit and leaves this heaven-like-haziness to flood through my memory. And it’s stupid, Mom, it’s fucking dumb. It’s like everything I’ve ever wanted, I’ve already had. And although I’ve never been in a position in my life when I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m fucking happy, I take a glance back over my shoulder at something that’s passed and it’s the equivalent of heaven. The moment my fingers loosen their grip on it, I have to have it back.

I know I’m stuck in the past.

I know I shouldn’t be writing to you.

I know I should’ve attended grandad’s funeral a few weeks back but shit was so hectic, so wild. The truth is that I’ve met somebody, and I didn’t know how to approach you with it. When you called, I was taken by surprise more about the fact that you still held tight onto your voice around the edges like you used to when you’d say you hated the way you sounded on the phone than I was about the fact that my grandfather had passed away. Again regarding the concept of beginning, I’m very good at suppressing emotion. So much so that I don’t often feel anything anymore, at least not for a period of time after I’m supposed to.

The death is something I haven’t quite processed yet. Feels weird writing it down, even now, after the funeral. I hope Adrian’s coping okay, though I don’t doubt he is. If you’ve even read this far, please tell him that I think about him everyday and I see him in every child I pass and I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly. It was the best decision on my own behalf, to escape such toxicity and to realise everything I’m writing down for you now, but I should’ve consulted you both before leaving. I never intended to make either of you feel like you were worth nothing more than a fucking note I’d scribbled down in thirty seconds and tossed onto the kitchen counter.

I’d change so much if I could, Mom.

I’d do so much differently.

I’m just like the man you married and the man who wasn’t there to take the blade from your hands and the man who fucked us over and left us for dead. 

This person I’ve met, Adrian would like him. You might, too. I didn’t tell you about him when you called even though I know I probably should’ve. It just didn’t feel like the right time. We’ve been talking for a while, longer than you’d think. I don’t know how much you know about it, but I want to be a writer and this person, Phil, he does too. He’s a lot better than me, but it’s easy to ignore that and work to support each other. It seems like a shout into the void, something that’d never work although we’re entirely dependant on it, but it’ll work. It will. Phil’s thinking of sending to publishers soon.

You’d like his words, Mom.

His art.

He says that he strives to imitate paint with language and I think it’s so beautiful.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed the ambiguous state of my sexuality because, since Dad left, I’ve been trying to compress everything I’ve felt. It’s deep water, the concept of relationships. Lovers. The way Dad reacted and dealt with homosexuality fixed a fear of myself within me. It isn’t the time to talk to you about this, for that’s another opportunity I didn’t take when I had the chance, but I just wanted you to know about this guy. Phil. If I hadn’t met him, I don’t think I’d be writing this to you now. He makes me think, he makes me feel. There’s black and there’s white, Mom, and he proposes the grey in every situation so that I consider all perspectives and don’t disregard the complete spectrum of colour.

It’s relevant because I think a lot about you and Dad. Your relationship, your connection, your beginning and your end. All the moments built into place between. There’s something wired in my brain that draws comparisons and contrasts to that relationship and my own because I was raised in aversion to it and am too self-conscious to let myself be the equivalent. So I’ve been writing a lot, thinking a lot, and Phil told me he thought it’d be a good idea to contact you. Not with the expectation of getting a reply, but so that I don’t carry the weight of the past with me through the rest of my life.

I don’t want to continue living in the toxicity I grew up with. You didn’t intend for any of it to happen, I know, and maybe if it’s meant to be, it’ll just be. Maybe my love for him will mirror your love for my father and blur the lines between good and bad. And with Phil, when it’s good, it’s so fucking good. When juxtaposed with the bad, I know I’d stay through the worst days just to see the better return. Even though I don’t think I know the worst well enough yet.

I’m staying with his parents currently, but we’re hoping to fix up a flat in Manchester some day, when he’s completed the process of publishing. I’ve known him for a bit now, Phil, and it’s hard to promise that it’s anything other than a fleeting glimpse of teenage romance but I don’t think this will turn out the same as the previous relationships I’ve had. It’s just an inkling I have, a hunch. Phil’s book will sell and I can promise him that, promise you that I’m learning through my feelings for him how to feel okay with my feelings towards you.

Soon, everything will be alright.

In the perspective I’m speaking from right now, I know that I deserve it to be. And in the same perspective, I know you do too. You crafted my beginning from ill health but well intention and Phil’s crafting his own for me now, from diction that feels like home and room to settle between the walls of closure. I’m still smoking the same shit, but it isn’t enough to get me addicted. We smoke it together, like you and Dad used to. We know our limits though, Phil says, and that’s the difference. He isn’t the kind-of man to consent to a substance taking over his life and I hope you know I’m not, either.

I’m sorry for everything I brought to the doorstep, to your feet and to hang over your shoulders as if I felt you deserved to be driven to sleeping pills over your lack of experience on what the fuck to do with the pile of shit you had waiting to be addressed. As if I felt you deserved to swallow empty promises and tangled ambitions and a kid smoking weed under the roof you won’t be able to afford by the end of the month. I don’t know how it tasted going down, all of that, but I’m sorry I fucked up in places I can’t even reach anymore to patch up. If fixing you and everything I did to hurt you was as simple as fixing a leak in the ceiling or the peeling of dampened wallpaper, I’d find the cash and I’d fix you. Stitch you right back up, where the threads have stretched and pulled like hoodies worn six days a week and marriages entertained with the right to remould it into a divorce. It feels like I’ve spent every moment of my life waiting on you to find the cash to find the cash to never have to find the cash again.

And you deserve the world for what you did for me, even though you’d never think so. Even though you deserve better, but all this world has to offer is everything it has and, goddamn, I don’t think that’s enough. The shit I’m smoking now, it’s nothing much. I won’t let it do me any harm like I won’t let it do Phil and I’s relationship any harm and, when I get my feet on the ground with this writing thing, I won’t have to do it no more. I guarantee, I won’t even remember I did it years from now. 

I’m not sure where I intend to be.

A book, a house, a steady pay that I don’t have to blow on drugs. I intend to be good, Mom, and I intend to be happy. I’d like to go to Paris someday, write something because I don’t know what I’m looking for but I’ve got this feeling I’ll find it there. I spend a lot of time reading up on artists who’d give you the name of the city in a sticky-sided envelope if you asked them what their heaven was. Who’d tell you that you don't need to pass an English exam to know the cement layered between the bricks of ‘creativity’ is no little or no more than thought. Like we are no little or no more than blurred convictions, no little or no more than concealed and contained and constructed of brainwaves pointing quivering fingers in the same direction.

No little or no more than duplicated, stale-tasting clichés.

Ribs plucked apart like bristles.

Careful fingers.

Yellow tips.

No little or no more.

It’s everything you said you wanted and everything you won’t speak of not reaching and it’s being too cold, it’s being too cryptic. It’s the psychiatric-appointments you called and you cancelled and it’s the drags I took of the rolled cigarettes before I wrote to you that sometimes people do weird shit to make them happy. That I never got to hand you the note signing off from all I’d done wrong and informing you of how it was my new lover who taught me the French soldiers fought in red and heaven is no heaven, maybe, but that’s heaven in itself.

It was my new lover who taught me I didn’t have to be what my father was and you didn’t mean to be what my mother was and he’s a fucking nihilist, Phil, but he’s fucking good at it. Purpose, persuasion.

It’s been years since you read my words and carved a sentence of how you didn’t like my tendency to unintentionally romanticise the mentally ill with your red nails over the paper. I write the same way, Mom, but it’s better.

I’m better.

I intend to be, too.

And despite how deep my regret is for hurting you and Adrian, what is is what is and what is is what will be.

Please, tell him to call me.

I rang him a few days ago on that piece of-shit phone you bought him before I left and I was so drunk that I thought he’d pick up, but he didn’t. And I’m glad, I’m so glad, for I don’t know what I would’ve said under such high influence. But I’m ready to talk, to explain and make the effort I never knew how to make before and if you only ever grant me one more shot at stolen happiness, let it be this.

Let him call.

I’ve forgotten where we started, forgotten how we end, and I don’t know in what way to apologise other than to break my pencil lead with the pressure I push these words into this page for you.

I am so fucking sorry.

I waited for you in the hospital and I’ll wait for you now, wherever in a shitty place and whenever in a shitty timezone. Between muddles of memories, beneath colourless skies like canvases I can turn my skinny wrists to in order to reach the surface and paint your name at the beginning and the end. As if you’re that metaphor I heard only the greatest poets use of spinning in three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circles and clinging to the past with shoes made of concrete in oceans of what used to be.

Things will soon be as they should be, and I’ll breathe again. I’ll think again and I’ll eat again and I’ll consider again the exact extent as to which my hurting hurt you.

It’ll be Christmas Eve by the time you receive this, and I’ll be sitting with Phil amongst the lights and the snow skirting the party he’s holding at his parents’ place. And amid the music and the drugs, I’ll pray with every ounce of faith your faithless shadow cast upon me that you understand you don’t have to keep your fingers hooked around your cross to feel alive. You don’t have to continue in repentance and I hope some day you’ll scrub the guilt from under your nails and wash it away from the back of your throat so you taste nothing when you spit the blood we share into the empty sink. We have the minds to split our skulls and the lungs to crack our ribs but we can be better with what remains because we’re learning every minute that all we’ll leave in our wake is the way we left.

So you are okay and you will be.

You are loved and you are forgiven.

And if I never get another chance to curl your hair around my finger or cradle your child while he sleeps, I love you and I’m sorry.

I wish I could have made him stay.

I miss you too much to be mad anymore. Car engines sound like alarms now and treaties look the same as suicide notes. I cannot truly say how I came here and I cannot truly say why, but I feel there’s a reason one day I’ll find.

I hope to see you again, however far-fetched it seems. If you haven’t read this far—if you don’t even decide to open the envelope—then I hope, at least, there’ll come a time when you realise without having to hear me say it that I am sorry, I am sorry, I am never coming home.

It’s some hour past three on a grey morning and the sky is milk and words are just divided immediate pauses made to interpret and communicate loneliness. And I’ll believe in God this Christmas if Phil and I sit on the floor long enough to hear reindeer hooves on the roof.

Because people do weird shit to make them happy.

And I just want to be fucking happy.

So now it feels like you’re getting farther away, and nothing is the same but everything is how it used to be and I’ll write to you once more that we’ll be okay, both because we always are and because we don’t know how to be anything else. It’s impossible for me to tell you where I’ll be, but I’ll be okay.

I’ll learn to sleep again before the hour in which my thoughts creep down the slope of my spine and settle under the small stretch of my skin, as if trying to mutter the cowardice in departure to me when I think about the shopping lists you’d jot onto the back of your hand. When I think about your blouses strung up on washing lines with their sleeves hanging like a mockery of the sixth year I spent dangling from the monkey bars and holding myself upside down from the couch so that I could record the way the ceiling looked beneath my trainers. The hallway light when I searched for you after you left the hotel room we stayed in because Dad called to say that he wanted to see you. And the night you crossed your legs on the kitchen floor and spoke in verses of strawberry ice-cream and _Don Quixote_ and I wasn’t frightened of the dark or the noises my stomach made.

I wasn’t frightened of you, and you weren’t frightened of me. And neither of us were frightened of being frightened of one another because our silences weren’t littered with throats heaving the words we didn’t know how to unclench our teeth for. There’s an absence in my heart that equates to a regret for not learning how to make apology-flowers bloom down receivers before you called me weeks ago and I struggle to write the word ‘mother’ without my abdomen twisting like it’s been placed into the hands of a contortionist.

You can find me in the gentle declaration of his passing and the careful words I use to ask you to gather consistency in the things you don’t believe in and the people who don’t believe in you. Whether it still rings true, you used to whisper to me that you wanted to be everything you weren’t because everything you were wasn’t good enough and if you were anything, I’d lay with you and think, you’d be the sky strung up over England that tries its best to be what it’s demanded to be but can never quite be it. The heat through the rain and the rain through July, coming up for air between the rushes of water down the rolling roofs before remembering that lungs can’t filter inhales of storms. If you were anything, you’d be the breath of the man slumped down beside the curb of the street that preaches poverty and teaches curriculums constructed of incongruity.

You’d be my mother, my friend, my beginning and my middle and my end I choose to draw circles around like it doesn’t matter that it won’t matter when it comes. And I wish I knew how to speak your name because it would make the question of why the fuck my words are printed with gashes that bleed like I tore the bandages off too soon easier to respond to.

And if I was anybody you wanted to listen to, I’d make an attempt at teaching you the shit you don’t believe I could ever understand. I’d pluck apart the close proximity of your ribs and reach between and up because somewhere, I know, there’s something inside of you that you need somebody to touch. Concealed within the spacious area surrounding your organs, it’s waiting and aching and your brain broadcasts selfishness through commercials as if your eyes are two disproportioned TV screens. And I’m just sat here waiting for the next scene because I don’t know when it’ll be over and I don’t know how to tell you what would happen if this ended now. I feel I’ve already lost you but I’m not, and never claimed to be, the tiled floor beneath your bare feet when you danced down the hall to meet angles of sunlight leaning through the kitchen window and the hospital white stuck to your skin when you gave birth to your first child. I’m not the little bumps or tiny fingers and I’m not my father’s arm laying limp beneath you and I’m not your fucking reason to stay, Mom, but stay.

Stay.

Don’t doubt the probability that there’s somebody who watches another channel and knows how to use the volume button on the shitty remote for the set in your eyes. There are too many people who regard recognition of departure as synonymous with importance and I’m not trying to question your logic, but calculate the space you contain and counter it with your query of what you’re fucking living for the next time you’re caught beneath the tidal wave of self-disgust.

We are sitting and waiting for something to come about, but we can’t expect to expect something forever. People walk around with schedules smudged like newspaper print over their skin but you don’t have to follow according to plan.

And I don’t think you’ll ever write me back. So wherever you are, and whoever you’re with, and what you’re doing:

I love you.

God knows you’re fucking trying.

Goodbye,

Dan.

[P.S] I keep a list of things I hope to be some day within the lines of my work. Number eighteen is to be the eighteen-year-old who makes the right decisions and twenty-four is to be the guy who remembers not to fix his oxygen mask first. I’ll set myself apart from what I have and what I want and I’ll grow taller, grow harsher, grow thinner but quicker to realise when everything is too much.

I’ll work my love into my fiction.

I’ll write my apology to my brother.

I’ll eat my words and fold my corners.

And the sadness will last forever.

**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “ _Yo, its ya girl. Sooo this writer’s got me messed up, man, she’s fucking kind enough to put me in my favourite story??? Like??? I s2g, I am NOT that cool in real life, though she adds specific details she read through our conversations and nothing is made up of nothing, it’s like... She just understands shit most people don’t? I loved this story, honestly, and even before she fucking added me in her masterpiece (blessed). So here’s me, Elaine, or Hélène for you, signing off and thanking my friend for everything, love ya, you’re absolutely insane (in the membrane.)_ ”
> 
> A-fucking-men, girl. Don’t know if I could arrange words in a sentence to tell you how big of an impact you’ve had on me and this fic, so I’ll work on that. Just fuck, thank you.
> 
> And okayyy, so holy fuck, this is the end?? I’ve literally exhausted myself of anything to say because this is the greatest work I have and I’ve never created anything so personal or emotionally moving on my own behalf. This final letter has been in progress for a while now and I have every intention of you doubting its credibility. But I can assure you that every question you have, there’s an answer for if you look hard enough. I never intended for Teeth to be a story that you read through once and understand it in its entirety. There are elements of it that I’m unable to explain, for they’re areas of my subconscious that I depicted with metaphors and symbols and don’t have the ability to detail to you eloquently. The concluding afterword may take days, may take weeks, may take months. If you reread the story, take your time and study every sentence until you feel like you’re losing your mind. You have to lose it to understand it.
> 
> Finally, I just want to say that, I appreciate the people who have stuck with this until the end so, so much. It’s been a long ride, a heavy ride, but I hope worth all the time and heartache. Keep your eyes open for the afterword but, until then, figure out what this pile of shit means.
> 
> It took a lot out of me and I’m proud to call it complete.
> 
> So, enjoy it.
> 
> Breathe it.
> 
> Oh, and try some yellow paint.


End file.
